Bjarke Ingels' unfurling wall-based pavilion joins four summer houses—designed by Asif Khan, Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, and Yona Friedman—to create this year's Serpentine Architecture Program. Each of the four summer houses riffs on the adjacent Queen Caroline's Temple designed in 1734, while BIG's Serpentine Pavilion appears to have been inspired by the desire to, according to an interview with Ingels in the Standard, "use rationality and rigour to create the extraordinary out of the ordinary.”
“We’ve played with one of the most basic elements [of a building] — the wall,” Ingels explains. “Typically, walls are made from stacked identical elements. When you see it you can sense how it fits into our general way of thinking. We are playing with the idea of bigamy — you don’t have to choose between box or blob.”
According to the Serpentine Pavilion's website, Asif Khan's summer house was designed in part to mimic the Queen Caroline Temple's orientation toward the Serpentine Lake, which would catch the rays of the sun as they were reflected from the water:
Prompted by an 18th century pavilion designed by William Kent which no longer exists, Barkow Leibinger created a summer house that incorporates 360 degree views:
Meanwhile, NLÉ created an "inverse replica" of the Queen Caroline temple:
Yona Friedman's modular summer house, which can be assembled and disassembled in various formations, builds on his 1950's project La Ville Spatiale (Spatial City):
5 Comments
It's not a box or a blob! It's mediocre grad student work I just hired last Thursday.
BIGamy... Or The relationship between Bjarke and his minions
Funny, I thought this was an architecture forum.
am wagering 34 comments before this one fizzles out
45 comments for "You won't believe the 10 things this new BIG design does"
It reimagines the wall
It educates your children
It connects the city
It unzips for BIGamy...wait
Surprised this thread didn't explode with comments.
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