Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has been preoccupied with some extraordinarily grand plans across the globe since the beginning of the year, but this week he has revealed a project on a more modest scale, revealing a series of renderings for the Serpentine Gallery’s annual pavilion. BIG has conceived an installation it calls “the unzipping of the wall,” comprising a pair of permeable planes that twist to reveal a space that will host a café and events space.
The sinuous structure — a flowing grid of gleaming fiberglass frames — constitutes an ethereal reinterpretation of one of architecture’s most basic elements, the brick wall. While the individual components that make up the pavilion are regular in profile, their complex arrangement results in a curvaceous, free-form skin reminiscent of a shell or billowing fabric.
“The unzipped wall creates a cave-like canyon lit through the fiberglass frames and the gaps between the shifted boxes as well as through the translucent resin of the fiberglass,” explains BIG. “As a result, the shifting overlaps — as well as the movement and presence of people outside — create a lively play of light and shadow on the cave walls within.”
The space will contain a café bar and benches that read as an extension of the timber floor, lending every surface a “warm glow and linear texture — from the mesh of the woven glass fibers to the undulating lines of the grain of the wood.” By night, the pavilion will be converted for use by the Serpentine Gallery’s annual Park Nights program, hosting a wide array of live artistic performances spanning music, film, dance and literature.
Upon BIG’s unveiling, gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist expressed their excitement about the design: “As you can see from the architect’s renders, Bjarke Ingels has responded to the brief for a multipurpose pavilion with a supremely elegant structure that is both curvaceous wall and soaring spire, that will surely serve as a beacon — drawing visitors across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to visit the pavilion, the summerhouses and our major exhibitions by Alex Katz and Etel Adnan.”
BIG’s pavilion is set to open in June and will be accompanied this year by four summerhouses by Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan.