Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei to design Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012
Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei to design Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012
The Serpentine Gallery announced the team that will design the twelfth edition of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a special edition that will be part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad.This years teams includes Pritzker laureate architects Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (runner up of TIME’s 2011 Person of the Year). The trio has worked together in projects such as ORDOS 100 in the Mongolian desert and the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games.Describing their design concept Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei said:“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 we encounter a diversity of constructed realities such as telephone cables and former foundations. Like a team of archaeologists, we identify these physical fragments as remains of the eleven Pavilions built between 2000 and 2011.These remains testify to the existence of the former Pavilions and their greater or lesser intervention in the natural environment of the park”.
