mardi 22 juillet 2008

# Serpentine Gallery's Pavilion 2008 is now open

As said in this post's title, the new Serpentine Gallery's pavilion has been inaugurated two days ago. This year, Frank Gehry with Ove Arup were appointed to design it and succeed to create a new impressing technical work. Although, I am quite desperate to observe that once more, what was created can be assimilated to an unique roof and people have been once more offered some basic benches where they can admire the genius'work... Does engineering is the only issue here ? Why do these TEMPORARY buildings have to be so frigid and neat ? When I visited Eliasson's last year pavilion I was with a guy who started to climb over the cone and who was immediatly yelled at and put back into the line of gregarious people visiting peacefully. Only MVRDV in 2004 proposed to tackle this problem but unfortunetly their pavilion was not constructed...

Here is a little reminder of past pavilions which are, I have to admit, all various and beautiful but which are also all hopelessly examples of what I was just observing.
As you might know, the Serpentine Gallery's Pavilion is appointed to an office which has never built any building in the UK.


2000. ZAHA HADID

2001. DANIEL LIBESKIND & OVE ARUP

2002. TOYO ITO & OVE ARUP

2003. OSCAR NIEMEYER

2004. MVRDV & OVE ARUP (un-realised)

2005. ALVARO SIZA, EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA & CECIL BALMOND

2006. OMA & CECIL BALMOND

2007. OLAFUR ELIASSON & KJETIL THORSEN