Here are a couple of model photos of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry.
The pavilion will be built beside the Serpentine Gallery in London this summer and is the latest in a series of temporary pavilions designed by architects including Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas.
See our stories on last year’s pavilion, designed by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Kjetil Thorsen of Snøhetta, starting here. See all the previous pavilions on the Serpentine Gallery’s website here.
Images are © Gehry Partners LLP 2008. Here’s the press release from the Serpentine Gallery:
–
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 will give London the first example of Frank Gehry’s spectacular architecture. The highly articulated structure – designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup – comprises large timber planks and multiple glass planes that soar and swoop at different angles to create a dramatic multi-dimensional space. Part-amphitheatre, part-promenade, these seemingly random elements will make a transformative place for reflection and relaxation by day, and discussion and performance by night.
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion series, now entering its ninth year, is the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, and is one of the most anticipated events in the international design calendar. Frank Gehry said: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate. As the visitor walks through the Pavilion they have access to terraced seating on both sides of the urban street. In addition to the terraced seating there are five elevated seating pods, which are accessed around the perimeter of the Pavilion. These pods serve as visual markers enclosing the street and can be used as stages, private viewing platforms and dining areas.”
Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, said: “Frank Gehry has designed an extraordinary Pavilion that opens up unexpected vistas to the Gallery, and the Park. It is a visionary scheme.”
The Pavilion will be the architect’s first built structure in England. He collaborated for the first time with his son Samuel Gehry.
Since 2001, Peter Rogers, Director of Stanhope, has donated his expertise to all aspects of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions and he continues to play a major role.
The Pavilion is a fully accessible public space in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens, attracting up to 250,000 visitors every Summer and is accompanied by an ambitious programme of public talks and events.
Frank Gehry
Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In subsequent years, Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia. His work has earned him several of the most significant awards in the architectural field, including the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture), the Praemium Imperiale Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Friedrich Kiesler Prize, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. Recent projects include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; Maggie’s Centre, a cancer patient care centre in Dundee, Scotland; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Some current projects include the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer Center in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Princeton Science Library in Princeton, New Jersey; the Hall Winery in Napa Valley, California; and the Puente de Vida Museo in Panama City, Panama.
Arup
Arup has worked on many of the Pavilions commissioned by Julia Peyton-Jones. Arup collaborated with Gehry Partners LLP to help evaluate the design strategies, choice of materials and structural typology of the 2008 Pavilion. Arup is also providing the engineering and specialist design on the project. The Arup team includes David Glover, Ed Clark with Cecil Balmond.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000. It is an ongoing programme of temporary structures by internationally acclaimed architects and individuals. It is unique worldwide and presents the work of an international architect or design team who, at the time of the Serpentine Gallery’s invitation, has not completed a building in England. The Pavilion architects to date are: Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, 2007; Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup, 2006; Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Arup, 2005; MVRDV with Arup, 2004 (un-realised); Oscar Niemeyer, 2003; Toyo Ito with Arup, 2002; Daniel Libeskind with Arup, 2001; and Zaha Hadid, 2000. Each Pavilion is sited on the Gallery’s lawn for three months and the immediacy of the process - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a peerless model for commissioning architecture. This year the project management of the Pavilion is being provided for the Serpentine Gallery by Jonathan Harper, Joanna Streeten and Tim Morse at Savant.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008:
Advisors: Arup , Stanhope
Project Management: Savant
–
Posted by Marcus Fairs
March 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Nice model, who dropped it ?
March 27th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Isn’t it so loud?
March 27th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Undoubtly impressive.
Not as beautiful as former ones by Snohetta, Koolhaas, Siza/Souto Moura and Ito.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
What a pile of crap…. is this a classic example of reduce, re-use, recycle?
I think the design concept must have been based on RE-USING pieces of models he had laying around from previous projects.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
There seems to be hope for me…in becoming an architect after all.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Nice TEMPLE!!!
March 27th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Who can and will stop this madness from this mad-man?? Save the world from Gehry!
March 27th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
GARBAGE !!!
March 27th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Is this what we’ve come to in architecture? I don’t see the “spectacular” aspect, rather its decay. An architecture that simulates a building in ruins couldn’t possibly be spectacular.
It’s just a mess.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
WHoa!! It looks like this model had a bad trip to the photo studio where these pictures were taken… Then it seems someone with no architecture experience whatsoever tried to put it back together and this was the final result.
Frank, man, what’s up with this? Is this some kind of practical joke?..
March 27th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
is this BEFORE or AFTER a tornado hits it?
March 27th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
HACK
March 27th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
well at least if it the construction does not finish on time we will never know…
March 27th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
frank gehry’s work has been great because he is willing to be bad. This piece is not perfect, but it is a brand new direction for him. He takes chances, and that’s why I love him. It was Gehry’s risks, like this piece, that saved architecture from modernism.
March 27th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Ha ha i was gonna post an ironic comment but i can’t beat tim’s so i won’t.
He wins
March 27th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
THE MAN IS GOING MAD!!!
March 27th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
No fish this time, just a pile of crap.
Gehry, oh gehry… just go fishin’
March 27th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
How avante garde… hiring a Los Angeles day-laborer to design architecture. That what Gehry did, right?
March 27th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I hate it right now, but I’m not sure if it being a scale model is making it feel smaller and more cluttered than it really will be.
An emphatic NO to the model, but I will withhold final judgment until I see the built structure.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
It’s not the EMP (Seattle) it’s the ECP, the Experience Crap Project.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
As a model I think this isnt to far from what most people are thinking.
The actual building may be a very different thing. A lot of people disliked and opposed his performance hall in California (US) but its grown on most and is amazing from the inside. There isnt much mention of material choices, beyond the basics, or color which could push the chaos in many directions. Also this was a colab between Gehry and his son so its hard to say how much of each is in this (ultimately more the senior Im sure).
March 27th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
He’s anticipating the construction standards of the British contractors, right?
March 27th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
PPBBBUUAHHHHAAAAHAHAHAHAAAA….
March 27th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I fail to understand the concept and direction from these images and model. For sure it may chime a different tune once you are immersed in the space and understand its relationship with its surroundings.
But from these I could be looking at some architecture proposal for a DERILICT fashion show.
March 28th, 2008 at 4:50 am
How do you stop Gehry….hahay.
March 28th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Respeto abiertamente al sr Gehry, pero realmente, hace falta tanta inconcordancia visual, para demostrar algo ?
Claro, si lo hace Frank, esta bien.
Si lo hace otro (un desconocido, por ejemplo), es un capricho de la ´inspiracion´.
Debemos evolucionar, hacia lo racional y funcional.
Como dice el maestro Niemeyer: ´Hay que protestar!!!´.
Yo protesto!!!
Alguien conoce la palabra: ´dicotomia´?
Saludos HAL.
pb
March 28th, 2008 at 10:16 am
gehry is one piece of good crap… how ironic
March 28th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I hate all of Gehry’s buildings, but at least he is trying something new. I cannot however see how it is justified to create such a blatantly wasetful, gratuititous, self indulgent structure given the chalenges of this age. This building has all the elegance of a morbidly obese American in a Burger King restaurant foodfight.
March 28th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
that last sentence was funny (james).
March 28th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
…where do they mention that his son is 5 years old… and destroyed the model repetitive times…
March 28th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
FRANK SCAREY
March 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Lone - Thanks for bringing some thought to the discussion. I think the experience of inhabiting a space that looks to be crumbling around you will be an amazing one. The qualities of light and materials used should be pretty stunning as well. I didn’t think I’d be as excited to see Gehry move back to his more deconstructed leanings, but he seems to be reveling in the temporary nature of the Pavilions.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
i heard from good authority Brad Pitt assisted extensively with this design!
Wow what a master pieces…
March 29th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
‘what a master pieces’…i love that phrase..lol
March 29th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
this is an advise for the architects out there…
please refrain from making model if
…you are too old…
shaky hands and …there you go - serpentine gallery pavilion!
March 29th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
and the classic:
“If you flip it upside down, THEN it might actually be interesting!
…and it again proves my point: If architects come of age, they somehow get weird.
March 29th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
looks a lot like every other project produced by my fellow students when i was in architecture school 13-14 years ago. in other words, total crap.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
ey don’t you think that the staircases are “tremendas”, just pasted from another model or something out of scale…
March 30th, 2008 at 3:19 am
I think Frank G is the architect who is willing to try extremity in architectural field.Although his works personally dont perferred but have to admit his architecture is “outstanding” one compared with other architects at his generation.
March 30th, 2008 at 8:43 am
This is utterly disgusting!
I hope that the real thing looks better than the model.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:06 am
this thing might suck..to u…. but he branded himself with all his similar works anyway. including this. its a subjective matter, either u like it, or u’ll hate it, u’ll never know the story behind it. thats the price
March 30th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
there is a certain limit to human perception of form. If we (architects) don’t seem to grasp the “meaning” of gehry’s form in this case… how can a layman ever understand it ?
i dont see any gestures of frozen bloat, fish architecture, glass in fabric form, winding serra. This is a stepback gesture of pliant form without a trace of calm order to it.
Frank Gehry should stop collaborating with Samuel Gehry.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:29 am
Our comments wouldn’t matter to him. He is passed above dealing with criticisms. Who are we? He is already The Frank Gehry anyway.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Let’s hope when he says it will offer shade from the sun he remembers to glaze the windows properly. Those details are important, like in LA where his shiny titanium was reflecting so heavily that it was overheating the nearby buildings. Some weeks after it was “completed” workers had to come back and sandblast the thing.
Maybe that is what Arup is for, actually putting his design into some buildable?
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
How can Gehry’s office cleaner distinguish which one is junk or model?
April 8th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I love it!
Organized Chaos.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
…clearly he stopped throwing wrapped papers to recycle old models… or … it might be a piece of work from some hotshot scholarship or Hollywood actor…even though, Ghery is very capable of doing something like this by himself alone!
April 8th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
can’t wait not to go
April 8th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
i’m dying to see it in real.
must be amazing the shades that the structure and surroundings are going to make.
it is definitely a very challenging space. yes, i would call it rather space…
April 9th, 2008 at 3:16 am
A pity really, he used to create such beautiful objects…..
April 9th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
one more sue will stop ghery from doing this?
April 11th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Buena madera para prender el asado. Ojo que la madera tratada es toxica, a no joder.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:07 am
brilliant.
May 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
its PERFECT
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
“It is a visionary scheme.” hahaha.