Design News: Serpentine Summer Houses for 2016

Design News: Serpentine Summer Houses for 2016 – The Serpentine Gallery has unveiled the designs for four Summer Houses that will accompany this year’s Bjarke Ingels designed Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, in London.

The four structures form part of the gallery’s newly expanded annual architecture programme.

Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, Berlin studio Barkow Leibinger, Paris-based architect Yona Friedman and British architect Asif Khan will each create an architectural folly to accompany the main pavilion, now in its 15th year.

The structures are intended to reference the 18th-century Neoclassical summerhouse – named Queen Caroline’s Temple – that is also located in Kensington Gardens.

Adeyemi of NLÉ has created an inverse replica of the folly, which will be constructed from prefabricated building blocks assembled from sandstone. The architect intends the Temple to fulfil the primary purpose of a summerhouse as a space for shelter and relaxation.

“The carved-out void, soft interior and fragmented furniture blocks create comfortable spaces for people to eat, rest or play – in and around the house – all through the summer season,” said Adeyemi.

Asif Khan has drawn on the Temple’s location close to the water and the way it catches sunlight reflected off the Serpentine lake for his design. His summerhouse features a polished metal platform and roof, surrounded the undulating timber staves. Stepping stones mark the entrance to Khan’s structure.

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Barkow Leibinger has based its design on a second 18th-century building that once rotated on top of an artificial hill to offer panoramic views of the Royal Park but was later demolished.

“With this absent structure in mind, we have designed a summerhouse in-the-round,” said the architects. “Standing free with all its sides visible, and conceived as a series of undulating structural bands, it is reminiscent of a blind contour drawing (a drawing executed without lifting the pencil up from the paper and only looking at the subject).”

Finally, Yona Friedman has designed a structure based on his La Villa Spatiale project, which the architect has been working on since the 1950s. This proposes using mobile and modular architecture to allow cities to grow without needing lots of land and to help people create their own house designs.

“The Serpentine Summer House is a ‘space-chain’ structure that constitutes a fragment of a larger grid structure, originally conceived for La Ville Spatiale,” said Friedman. “It is a modular structure that can be disassembled and assembled in different formations and compositions.”