Ishigami's 'Billowing' Serpentine Pavilion Unveiled

John Hill

14. February 2019

Image: Serpentine Pavilion 2019, Design Render, Exterior View, © Junya Ishigami + Associates

Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has been selected to design the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion. Renderings reveal a slate canopy effortlessly lifted above the landscape of Kensington Gardens on a grid of stilts.

Today's announcement from the Serpentine Galleries was accompanied by a couple renderings, one showing the water puddling on and dripping across the exterior surface of the slate canopy, the other depicting the compressed, cave-like space beneath the canopy. Without any walls or means of partitioning the space beyond the grid of pilotis, the design articulates Ishigami's "free space" philosophy "in which he seeks harmony between man-made structures and those that already exist in nature," per a statement from Serpentine Galleries.

Image: Serpentine Pavilion 2019, Design Render, Interior View, © Junya Ishigami + Associates

Ishigami's description of the pavilion design:
My design for the Pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasising a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks. This is an attempt to supplement traditional architecture with modern methodologies and concepts, to create in this place an expanse of scenery like never seen before. Possessing the weighty presence of slate roofs seen around the world, and simultaneously appearing so light it could blow away in the breeze, the cluster of scattered rock levitates, like a billowing piece of fabric.

Junya Ishigami, KAIT Workshop, Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Japan, 2008 (Photo © Junya Ishigami + Associates)

Ishigami's pavilion design immediately recalls his most well-known building, the KAIT Workswhop in Japan. Completed in 2008, four years after Ishigami founded his firm following a stint at SANAA, the building is basically a one-story open space beneath a flat roof propped up by slender columns of various sizes. The Serpentine Pavilion's pooling roof also recalls the minimal water garden he created for Art Biotop Nasu last year.

Junya Ishigami, Botanical Garden Art Biotop / Water Garden, Tochigi, Japan, 2018 (Photo © Junya Ishigami + Associates)

Designers of recent Serpentine Pavilions:

2018: Frida Escobedo (Mexico)
2017: Francis Kéré (Germany)
2016: Bjarke Ingels (Denmark)
2015: SelgasCano (Spain)
2014: Smiljan Radić (Chile)
2013: Sou Fujimoto (Japan)

The 2019 Serpentine Pavilion will be built on the lawn next to the Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens and will be on display from June 20 – October 6, 2019.