Where do the Serpentine Pavilions go after the summer season?
The Serpentine Pavilions are a beloved summer staple in the annual architecture calendar, but what happens to them after their time at Kensignton Gardens is over? Here, we track their whereabouts and follow their journey around the world
![Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion at Hauser & Wirth's Somerset outpost](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/sYG7TsS8vpUkT36LYzJviU-415-80.jpg)
It won’t be long now before this year’s Serpentine Pavilion appears in Kensington Gardens, on the lawns outside the Serpentine Gallery. The latest edition has been designed by Sumayya Vally and her young South African practice Counterspace. The commission followed the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo (at 38 by far the youngest to take up the privilege in 2018) and Junya Ishigami in 2019.
Further predecessors, now numbering over 20, have ended up all over the world, mostly purchased by wealthy, enlightened art collectors. 2017's version by Diébédo Francis Kéré, an architect from Burkina Faso, was snapped up by the Ilham Gallery of Kuala Lumpur and is yet to be set up in its new home somewhere in the Klang Valley region where KL is located. Such cultural cross-pollination – Kere’s pavilion has a proudly African language – has become an inadvertent outcome of a project that really started out by accident.
Francis Kéré’s 2017 Serpentine Pavilion.
In 2000, Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery’s co-director from 1991 to 2016, asked her friend Zaha Hadid to design a temporary shelter for the Serpentine’s 30th birthday celebrations. The triangulated structure – a great success – stayed in place for three months and in the city which had silently decreed Hadid’s designs unbuildable at best, and unreadable at worst, became jokingly known as her first building in London.
Thereafter, a series of architects who had never been invited to construct in the capital – names as stellar as Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas – went on to create temporary shelters for the Serpentine’s summer season.
Rem Koolhaas’ 2006 Serpentine Pavilion.
Zaha’s tent met a less than illustrious end – first it spent some time in a car park in Stratford-upon-Avon and now resides at the Flambards Theme Park in Helston, Cornwall. It is covered in a silvery grey tarpaulin, and a very popular wedding venue. And the Cloud, an ethereal architectural abstraction by the Japanese Sou Fujimoto from 2103, floated off to Albania, where it controversially stood in front of Tirana’s National Gallery and was quickly co-opted by Albanian Vodaphone as a great place to hang their advertising.
Zaha Hadid’s 2000 Serpentine Pavilion.
But others have gone on to find highly desirable homes. The one by Smiljan Radic, which stood like a radical pebble in Kensington Gardens in the summer of 2014, travelled to Bruton in Somerset. There it forms the perfect full-stop to gardens designed by plantsman Piet Oudolf at the Hauser & Wirth art campus of Durslade Farm. ‘It’s extraordinary – no, exceptional – to see a building in quite another situation. Usually it’s the building that stays in one place, and the landscape that changes around it,’ said Radic at the time of its re-installation, as though he had seen a ghost.
Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion.
The property developer Victor Hwang took Toyo Ito’s 2002 geometric explosion off to the south of France, where it sits in the grounds of Le Beauvallon, a belle epoque chateau. ‘It’s a visual masterpiece,’ said Hwang of the project which is now surrounded by parasol pines, and next to the sea. Not far away, the Irish hotelier and developer Paddy McKillen has found a space for Frank Gehry’s equally explosive variant at Château La Coste, where it rubs shoulders with works by Tracey Emin, Richard Serra and Lee Ufan. ‘When Frank saw it here, he was really moved,‘ said McKillen of the dip in the landscape where its placed. ‘you can look down on it now, and get a real sense of its multiple perspectives.’ Stephen Rea liked it so much, he staged a Bloomsday celebration in honour of James Joyce there.
Wallpaper* Newsletter + Free Download
For a free digital copy of August Wallpaper*, celebrating Creative America, sign up today to receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories
Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine Pavilion.
Some remain in boxes, though not for long. The multi-coloured cellophane folly by the Catalan practice SelgasCano from 2015 will be installed in Los Angeles as soon as co-working brand Second Home has set up its space in the city. Bjarke Ingels’ modular masterpiece from 2016 is to be reassembled, block by translucent fibreglass block, in Toronto by late summer. He’s Danish and practises internationally. Anyway, who cares. Suffice to say, these pavilions are definitely proving to be architecture without borders.
INFORMATION
The Serpentine Pavilion designed by Sumayya Vally and Counterspace opens in June 2021
-
‘Hedonistic and avant-garde’: Rabanne’s Julian Dossena on the legacy of the chainmail 1969 bag
Paco Rabanne’s 1969 chainmail handbag encapsulates the late designer’s futuristic, space-age style. Current creative director Julien Dossena tells Wallpaper* about the bag’s particular pleasures
By Jack Moss Published
-
Postcard from Paris: Olympic fever takes over the streets
On the eve of the opening ceremony of Paris 2024, our correspondent shares her views from the streets of the capital about how the event is impacting the urban landscape.
By Minako Norimatsu Published
-
The Mercury Prize nominees for 2024 have been revealed
Charli XCX, The Last Dinner Party and Beth Gibbons are amongst this year's nominees
By Charlotte Gunn Published
-
‘Mental health, motherhood and class’: Hannah Perry’s dynamic installation at Baltic
Hannah Perry's exhibition ’Manual Labour’ is on show at Baltic in Gateshead, UK, a five-part installation drawing parallels between motherhood and factory work
By Emily Steer Published
-
Francis Alÿs plots child play around the world at the Barbican
In Francis Alÿs' exhibition ‘Ricochets’ at London’s Barbican, the artist explores the universality of play, even in challenging situations
By Amah-Rose Abrams Published
-
At Glastonbury’s Shangri-La, activism and innovation meet
Glastonbury’s south-east corner is known for its after-dark entertainment but by day, there is a different story to tell
By Rhian Daly Published
-
‘I am almost an anti-sculptor’: Dominique White on her Whitechapel Max Mara Art Prize show
The artist mines the ocean to explore Afrofuturism in ‘Deadweight’, opening at London’s Whitechapel and detailed in a new film
By Amah-Rose Abrams Published
-
Remembering Rusty Egan's Blitz Club: a place to 'avoid the mob and the homophobes', where the New Romantics were born
As he releases new vinyl boxset, 'Blitzed!', Wallpaper* meets DJ Rusty Egan to talk about London's scene-building Blitz club – the antidote to the late 70s punk scene and a hot-bed of experimental fashion
By Craig McLean Published
-
Suzannah Pettigrew's 'tender and ghostly' new show at Surrealist photographer Lee Miller's former home in East Sussex
London-based artist Suzannah Pettigrew's photographic stills create a snapshot of her Sussex coast childhood, conjuring up a hallucinatory world of memory
By Mary Cleary Published
-
The body, pleasure and play: Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland united in London
Tom of Finland’s homoeroticism meets Beryl Cook’s female-oriented camp as Studio Voltaire unites work by the two artists in a London exhibition
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Zanele Muholi celebrates South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in LA and London
Zanele Muholi's portraits and sculptures are currently on show at Southern Guild Los Angeles and the Tate Modern, London
By Hannah Silver Published