Author Description

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013 is designed by award-winning Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto (born 1971)--the thirteenth and, at 41, youngest architect to accept the invitation to design a temporary structure for the Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine's past pavilions have included designs by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei (2012), Frank Gehry (2008), the late Oscar Niemeyer (2003) and Zaha Hadid (2000). Inspired by organic structures such as forests, nests and caves, Fujimoto's buildings inhabit a space between nature and artificiality. Fujimoto's pavilion is a delicate, latticed structure of steel poles--lightweight and semi-transparent in appearance--that allows it to blend, cloudlike, into the landscape and against the classical backdrop of the Gallery's colonnaded East wing. It is designed as a flexible, multipurpose social space. This volume documents the project.