Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond ::: Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion 2006

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Serpentine Pavilion 2006 is co-designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas and innovative structural designer Cecil Balmond // 13 July - 15 October

About the photographs: 0lll has had the privilege to document and publish the construction process of the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion since the Toyo Ito's project was build on the gallery lawn in 2002.
With every pavilion we have tried different things, starting with Ito's when we had no idea of how the final product was going to look like, we concentrated on individual pieces and witnessed how these came together to create and indivisible whole. For the Niemeyer building we stitched series of photographs to create panoramic images which showed the dynamic of the construction site and the relation of the pavilion with the landscape. Having the chance to go high above the site with the use of a cherry picker during the building of Siza's pavilion and being able to look at the expanse of Hyde Park, the Serpentine and Kensington Gardens we could easily imagine how wonderful it would have been to climb MVRDV's unrealised mountain pavilion of 2004. The pavilion by Siza and Eduardo Soto de Moura was particularly interesting to us because it seemed compact and introverted when seen from the outside but in fact its interior space expanded in all directions including the vertical axis.
The renders of Rem Koolhaas' project are enigmatic. We see something hovering above the gallery lawn. A cloud, a balloon filled with a grey gas framed by a halo of light. At the moment the final image remains a mystery but here you can see it taking shape. It looks like it will be the largest Serpentine Pavilion to this date. Two building sites are being use for its assembly. The balloon/cloud will easily top the gallery height. This photographs document the pavilion process but also watch the sky over the gallery. The ever changing summer sky of London, of constant winds and fast moving clouds. It is an expectant sky. A sky that is waiting for that new artificial cloud.