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Design

A Wall Unzips in Bjarke Ingels Group's Serpentine Pavilion

The architects behind 2 World Trade Center release plans for a spacially-twisted new pavilion outside London.
Serpentine Pavilion 2016 designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG); Design render © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Built on a seemingly straightforward concept, Danish art and architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group's newly announced design for the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion inverts everything you thought you knew the brick wall. Starting with a line, the designers "unzip" it, creating a space that feels like a stray pocket in space-time. BIG founder Bjarke Ingels describes it to The Creators Project as an organized collision of contradictions, "free-form ret rigorous, modular yet sculptural, both transparent and opaque, both box and blob."

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BIG's contribution marks the 16th year of the Serpentine Galleries' annual public architecture commission in London's Kensington Gardens. Last year Selgas Cano created a rainbow tunnel composed from lightweight eco-friendly plastic. Known for making outlandish ideas real—including a power plant decked out with Tesla Coils and a maze that gets easier the deeper you go—as well as designing 2 World Trade Center, BIG focuses on making a conceptual statement over an environmental one.

The 300 m2 structure will trade clay and mortar for a frame of extruded fiberglass. Effectively, the "bricks" are the air in between. The two sides pull away from one another like a zipper—from above they seem like a straight line, but at ground level the entrance to the pavilion's inner space is visible. A stark contrast to the transparent SyFy Channel-style curves are the warm wooden floors, rooting visitors in the natural even as they're surrounded by a scene out of Tomorrowland.

Serpentine Pavilion 2016 designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG); Design render © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

"Bjarke Ingels has responded to the brief for a multi-purpose Pavilion with a supremely elegant structure that is both curvacious wall ans soaring spire, that will surely serve as a beacon—drawing visitors acrose Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens," say Serpentine Galleries director Julia Petyon-Jones and Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

"This simple manipulation of the archetypical space-defining garden wall creates a presence in the Park that changes as you move around it and through it," Ingels explains. "The North-South elevation of the Pavilion is a perfect rectangle. The East-West elevation is an undulating sculptural silhouette. Towards the East-West, the Pavilion is completely opaque and material. Towards the North-South, it is entirely transparent and practically immaterial. As a result, presence becomes absence, orthogonal becomes curvilinear, structure becomes gesture and box becomes blob."

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Check out more renderings of the BIG 2016 Serpentine pavilion below.

Serpentine Pavilion 2016 designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG); Design render © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Serpentine Pavilion 2016 designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG); Design render © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

Serpentine Pavilion 2016 designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG); Design render © Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)

See more of Bjarke Ingels Group's work on their website.

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