The Serpentine Gallery announced today that Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano will design its annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion to be installed in the summer of 2015 within London’s Kensington Gardens. Designs for the temporary structure—which will be SelgasCano’s first new structure in the U.K., in keeping with the traditions of past Serpentine Gallery Pavilions—will be released in February 2015. The architects, who opened their Madrid-based firm SelgasCano in 1998, are best known for works such as Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Centre in Cáceres, Spain, which features several layers of suspended walkways and seating; and the firm’s own office, a sleek, glass-walled tube in the forest.
"This is an amazing and unique opportunity to work in a Royal Garden in the centre of London. Both aspects, ‘Garden’ and ‘London’, are very important for us in the development of this project,” the architects said in a release, offering hints at what their rendition of the pavilion will include. “Garden and London will be the elements to show and develop in the Pavilion. For that we are going to use only one material as a canvas for both: the Transparency. That ‘material’ has to be explored in all its structural possibilities, avoiding any other secondary material that supports it, and the most advanced technologies will be needed to be employed to accomplish that transparency. A good definition for the pavilion can be taken from J. M. Barrie: it aims to be as a ‘Betwixt-and-Between’."
SelgasCano will collaborate with AECOM and David Glover on the engineering and technical design of the structure. The 2015 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion will open June 26, 2015, and will run through Oct. 18.
See all of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions in ARCHITECT's Project Gallery.