Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

Every year since 2000, a different architect has been responsible for creating the Serpentine Gallery’s Summer Pavilion for Kensington Gardens. That makes eleven Pavilions so far, our contribution is the twelfth. So many Pavilions in so many different shapes and out of so many different materials have been conceived and built that we tried instinctively to sidestep the unavoidable problem of creating an object, a concrete shape. Our path to an alternative solution involves digging down some five feet into the soil of the park until we reach the groundwater. There we dig a waterhole, a kind of well, to collect all of the London rain that falls in the area of the Pavilion. In that way we incorporate an otherwise invisible aspect of reality in the park – the water under the ground – into our Pavilion.

As we dig down into the earth to reach the groundwater, we encounter a diversity of constructed realities such as telephone cables, remains of former foundations or backfills. Like a team of archaeologists, we identify these physical fragments as remains of the eleven Pavilions built between 2000 and 2011. Their shape varies: circular, long and narrow, dot shaped and also large, constructed hollows that have been filled in. These remnants testify to the existence of the former Pavilions and their more or less invasive intervention in the natural environment of the park.

For the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion, Herzog & de Meuron joined forces with Ai Weiwei to turn the idea of a pavilion upside down - literally. Instead of building upward, they dug five feet into the ground of Kensington Gardens, carving out an underground chamber lined entirely in cork. Above it, a shallow pool of rainwater mirrored the sky.

The result was both architecture and archaeology: a meditation on memory, absence, and the unseen. Eleven cork columns referenced the footprints of past Serpentine pavilions; a twelfth marked their own, creating a tactile archive of temporary architecture. Visitors descended into a cool, muted interior - a soft counterpoint to the bustling park above.

Herzog & de Meuron’s structural precision met Ai Weiwei’s conceptual wit in a dialogue between surface and depth, visibility and concealment. Together, they transformed the pavilion into a site of excavation - of ideas, materials, and histories.

Cork, with its warmth and scent, offered an unexpected intimacy. The space was less a monument than a pause: a place to sit, listen, and consider what lies beneath the visible world.

As much as it commemorated past pavilions, the 2012 design also unearthed something timeless - the quiet power of collaboration between architecture and art, and the poetry found in the act of digging down rather than building up.