Bjarke Ingels Unveils Cathedral-Like Serpentine Pavilion in London
Bjarke Ingels of BIG vindicated his reputation as one of the world’s most influential young architects with the unveiling of his cathedral-like Serpentine Pavilion this morning in London. His 46-foot wall of 1,802 extruded fiberglass boxes stacked one on top of the other looks as if it’s been prized open or unzipped to form a dramatic cavernous walkway within. With two exits, one at each end, the soaring grey structure leads visitors from the street entrance across the lawn and towards the gallery doors.
“Interesting things happen when you take seemingly incompatible elements and you combine them into a new hybrid. We like to call it ‘bigamy’—that you can have both,” joked Ingels at this morning’s unveiling. “I think we’ve tried to make a structure that in an effortless way combines a lot of differences.”
Essentially it’s a wall that becomes a hall inside, it’s a gate to the Serpentine galleries with a view to its beautiful spire but it also creates a generous space for events.”
Not only is Ingels’ pavilion a hybrid in terms of its function, but also in terms of its appearance. When viewed from the front and back, it’s jutting fiberglass skin looks curvilinear and opaque, but when viewed side-on transforms into a orthogonal transparent grid, allowing visitors to see right through to the other side.
The design, which has been just six months in the making, stemmed from a shelving system Ingels was working on for Danish company Fiberline Concepts that was made up of extruded fiberglass elements. He describes the finished pavilion as “a hybrid between a building and a piece of furniture”—a giant shelf that visitors are encouraged to climb (within the Royal Park’s imposed height limit of course). “It creates a lot of unscripted possibilities both inside and outside,” says Ingels. “A great hero for me is Jørn Utzon. He was excited by this idea that you could create any imaginable form with any carefully designed and mass produced element; almost like creating difference out of repetition and it’s essentially that spirit we tried to bring here.”
Happily, the opening coincides with the opening of Ingel’s first London office, which is currently run by a team of 20. Acknowledging the serendipitous timing, Ingels concluded, “I couldn’t imaging a better way to celebrate this then to build a pavilion and to throw a party in the middle of a Royal Park.”