DESIGNS FOR BJARKE INGELS’S SERPENTINE PAVILION REVEALED

At first glance, Bjarke Ingels’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion design that was revealed today looks like a “mountain of ice cubes,” The Guardian reports. The architectural giant revisits one of the most basic architectural elements—the brick wall—and transforms the traditional textured barrier into a fluid three-dimensional space.

Made out of fiberglass frames, the pavilion was designed to look different from every direction. According to the Bjarke Ingels Group, the structure’s north-south side is meant to appear as a perfect rectangle. From its east-west side, it looks like an undulating white wave rising up out of the hillside that froze before it could break. At the top of the pavilion the blocks of the walls are interlocked, but then separate so that a cavity is created between them through which people can enter the pavilion.

Ingels wants the structure to appear as “modular yet sculptural, both transparent and opaque” and as “both box and blob.”

This year’s pavilion will also be accompanied by four summer houses commissioned by architects Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, Asif Khan, and Yona Friedman, as previously reported by artforum.com. The architects were asked to draw inspiration from Queen Caroline’s temple, a classical 1734 stone summer house located nearby the gallery. The initial designs for the houses feature a house constructed with massive solid, sandstone blocks, a structure made of long ribbon-like wooden loops, a lattice of steel rings, and a structure that will capture and play with the sun’s light.