They have been disclosed the designers of the new pavilion of the Serpentine gallery in London, in the year of the Olympics 2012: the archistars Herzog & de Meuron and the popular Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. After having designed together the stadium in Beijing, Bird’Nest, for the 2008 Olympics, the team comes together to design for the first time in England. It will be a pavilion celebrating all those who have come from 2000 until today by creating an underground installation consisting of eleven columns plus a twelfth, to symbolize this year’s edition, to support a platform suspended 1.5 meters above the ground.
With an archaeological spirit, the architects have come up with a design that induces visitors to look beneath the surface of the park, as well as back in time through the physical fragments of previous structures.
You will dig five until you reach the groundwater obtaining a waterhole that joins the water and the earth under the new pavilion.
“On the foundations of each individual pavilion, we extrude a new structure as load-bearing elements for the roof of our pavilion (…) roof, dry, it will be used as a dance floor or simply as a platform suspended above the park. In special events it will collect rainwater that can be discharged, like from a bathtub, into the waterhole ”say the architects.
The twelfth pavilion of the Serpentine gallery, the temporary structure of the Kensington Gardens was designed last summer by Peter Zumthor and before that by Jean Nouvel, the SANAA studio and Frank Gehry.
