Stockland Martel

Every year since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery in London has invited a distinguished architect to design a pavilion for its lawn, and the resulting stricture has almost always inspired debate—not just among arbiters of architecture and design but also among the locals. The Serpentine is in Hyde Park, in the center of the city, and visitors to the pavilion run the gamut from Pritzker Prize winners to pub crawlers, each one as vocal as the next.

So we’re especially looking forward to the reaction to this year’s pavilion, an amorphous construction made of reflective aluminum and dreamed up by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Japanese architects who design under the name SANAA. “The pavilion is floating aluminium, drifting freely between the trees like smoke,” explained the architects in a statement. “The reflective canopy undulates across the site, expanding the park and sky. Its appearance changes according to the weather, allowing it to melt into the surroundings. It works as a field of activity with no walls, allowing views to extend uninterrupted across the park and encouraging access from all sides. It is a sheltered extension of the park where people can read, relax, and enjoy lovely summer days.”

Having a hard time picturing it? Not to worry. John Offenbach will be photographing the pavilion, capturing the empirical and metaphorical efforts of the talented young architectural duo. This is the fifth year Offenbach has documented the pavilion project. The first time, in 2005, was under the auspices of The New York Times, which hired him to shoot the structure created by Portuguese architects Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond of design and engineering firm Arup. (That unusual pavilion was aptly described by the architects as a “vision of a crouching animal, hunched, ready to pounce on the gallery building.”) The next year, the Serpentine asked Offenbach back, and he’s been their pavilion documentarian ever since, photographing the work of such acclaimed architects as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas.

“I look forward immensely each year to photographing the Serpentine Gallery pavilion,” says Offenbach. “I am unashamedly an architectural groupie. The pavilion is an opportunity for everyone involved to feel good.  For the architects, it’s a stage to do something slightly different. For Londoners as well as visitors, it’s a beguiling and  spectacular structure, a meeting place to enjoy and make use of, in the beautiful surroundings of Hyde Park in the center of London.”

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 will be on view July 12 through October 18. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/