“This is the ultimate birthday present for a queen!” said architect Asif Khan, who designed one of the four new Summer Houses that are installed as part of the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion exhibition. Alongside BIG's main Serpentine Pavilion, Yona Friedman, NLÉ, and Barkow Leibinger each designed the other three houses that portray their own architectural flair. 

Khan's Summer House takes a poetic, what-could-have-been approach to reinterpreting the original Queen Caroline's Temple. The installation features a circular seat placed inside a circular form “shaped by vertical white slats softly bending upward”. Its circumference “has been unpeeled to connect us and the Temple to a picturesque moment left hidden by William Kent almost 300 years ago”, Khan describes in his artistic statement. 

Using sun path analysis, Khan realized that Kent aligned the Temple toward the direction of the rising sun on March 1, 1683 — Queen Caroline's birthday.  “Taking that as a moment in time, which Queen Caroline’s Temple is a response to, it’s only one part—it's only one moment in time and one sunrise, in one direction,” Khan said to Archinect's Robert Urquhart while Khan explained his design concept. “I wanted to create a summer house which reimagines what William Kent would do now.”

Read more about the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion and Summer Houses in Robert Urquhart's feature here.