After Sou Fujimoto, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Peter Zumthor, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, MVRDV, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid, Serpentine Galleries Pavilion programme returns to its original aim of endorsing younger and lesser known architects by commissioning this year’s project to Smiljan Radic.
Smiljan Radic (Santiago de Chile, 1965) earned his architectural degree from the School of Architecture at the Pontificie Universidad Católica de Chile in 1989 and later studied at the IUAV University in Venice (1990-1992). One of the youngest and least-known in the Serpentine’s programme, Radic is known for developing buildings which merge elements of natural and artificial, offering a sort of a metaphorical escape from urban reality and civilization. Among his most challenging, yet widely appreciated, projects are the Mestizo Restaurant in Santiago, Chile, the Copper House in Talca, Chile, and the renovation of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Santiago, Chile.
Radic described the pavilion commission as a leap of faith: “They are taking a big risk by choosing me. I’m not inside the common place of the architect, and it is really hard for me to do something so fast. But risks can be exciting.” In fact, his project appears to be one of the most exciting in the programme’s 14-year history. Resembling a primitive structure (one critic even described it as a sort of an alien cow bladder), Radic’s pavilion is structured as a circular, semi-transparent shell made of fibreglass suspended on large quarry stones which give the impression of a floating volume. In line with his previous projects and fascination with temporary, fragile constructions, the pavilion is “part of the history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies, which were hugely popular from the end of the 16th century to the start of the 19th”.
Smiljan Radic’s Serpentine Pavilion will open to the public on 26th of June 2014 and will remain in Kensington Gardens in London until 19th of October, hosting a series of eight site-specific events which bring together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory and three new commissions by emerging artists – Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson.
