For A Limited Time Only

Beauty is only temporary, but your mind lasts you a lifetime.

Alicia Machado

There is an amazing corner of London within Kensington Gardens and what makes this space more exciting than most is that the space changes for a few months every summer. The Serpentine Gallery is a public gallery space where unlike many places around London entry is free. The emphasis is not only on the art and installations you go to visit but about the environment you visit them within.

Back in 2000 the space was first transformed by Zaha Hadid. She transformed the area by creating a suspended roof pavilion making 600sq metres of outside space for displaying art and which thousands came to visit. I think there was also something compelling about this being a temporary structure, you only had a limited amount of time to see it in, asThe Guardian says "briefly brilliant..."

Zaha Hadid 2007

Since then the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned a different architect to design a structure for the summer months. There are no budget restrictions and the only parameters the architect(s) are made to design within are that they have to take their inspiration from the name given by the gallery director. What follows is then 6 months of hectic design, construction and finding sponsorship to pay for it. Also part of the criteria to be considered is that you must never have had a building completed in the UK before. So this shocks me to think that architects such as Zaha Hadid, Kjetil Thorsen,Frank Ghery, Rem Koolhaas and artist Olafur Eliasson could apply. Thank god there are schemes like this around, it's unbelievable that architects of such caliber at the time of application and even some still to this day had never had a work commissioned for UK soil.

Daniel Libeskind 2001

Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen 2007

Frank Ghery 2008

This month the most recent design was unveiled. It is cost affective for today's economic climate, simple but stunning. When the sun is out it will reflect and create illusions of light from the mirrored surfaces which will be mesmerising. The design was submitted and produced by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based architecture firm SANAA and some have described the structure as 'a stealth bomber-like pavilion' or a 'delicate floating pool of water'.

What has become clear is that within this simple space so much can be created. The designs from the past 9 years have been incomparable to each other and the uniqueness of each is the main reason why the pavilion is always a success. The structures are stunning and amazingly interactive, my only wish is that they would remain more permanent but then I think that would defeat the reason for why they exist in the first place and the temporay nature of the structures is what helps creates such beauty in form.