Rendering to Reality: Snapshots of Bjarke Ingels’ Serpentine Pavilion Surface on Instagram

On Tuesday morning, Bjarke Ingels’ Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens was officially unveiled to the press, but architecture fans active on social media had already been granted a sneak preview of the building beforehand thanks to snapshots posted on Instagram. Many of these great shots came from visitors and passersby, but a few were posted by Ingels himself.

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Like most of Ingels’ projects, the Serpentine Pavilion is truly one of a kind. The structure has been described as an “unzipped wall of bricks,” a phrase that nicely captures the sense of movement Ingels achieved with his sculptural arrangement of hollow fiberglass boxes.

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Ingels has noted that the building’s design was influenced by Minecraft, a video game in which players manipulate their environment to create inventive structures and landscapes that often depart wildly from established architectural conventions. This reporter is also reminded of the entrance to Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter films: an enchanted brick wall that, with a few taps of a wand, can disassemble itself brick by brick to form a threshold.

Like that enchanted wall, Ingels’ unusual building evokes a sense of open-endedness that speaks to the architect’s commitment to imagining new possibilities in architecture.

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Ingels’ structure is the 16th building commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries for its ongoing summer pavilions series. Each commission has typically been granted to a globally renowned architect who has yet to complete a significant building in the U.K. The first was designed by Zaha Hadid in 2000, and since then, Daniel Liebskind, Sou Fujimoto and others have created pavilions of their own.

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While reporters and Instagrammers have already been granted a sneak peek of the building, it does not officially open to the public until later this week.

Header image: computer rendering of the interior of the Serpentine Pavilion courtesy of BIG