Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 Designed by Frank Gehry

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Source from Serpentine Gallery website

Forthcoming Summer 2008
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 will give London the first example of Frank Gehry’s spectacular architecture. The highly articulated structure – designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup – comprises large timber planks and multiple glass planes that soar and swoop at different angles to create a dramatic multi-dimensional space. Part-amphitheatre, part-promenade, these seemingly random elements will make a transformative place for reflection and relaxation by day, and discussion and performance by night.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion series, now entering its ninth year, is the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, and is one of the most anticipated events in the international design calendar.

Frank Gehry said: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate. As the visitor walks through the Pavilion they have access to terraced seating on both sides of the urban street. In addition to the terraced seating there are five elevated seating pods, which are accessed around the perimeter of the Pavilion. These pods serve as visual markers enclosing the street and can be used as stages, private viewing platforms and dining areas.”

Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, said: “Frank Gehry has designed an extraordinary Pavilion that opens up unexpected vistas to the Gallery, and the Park. It is a visionary scheme.”

The Pavilion will be the architect’s first built structure in England. He collaborated for the first time with his son Samuel Gehry.
Since 2001, Peter Rogers, Director of Stanhope, has donated his expertise to all aspects of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions and he continues to play a major role.

The Pavilion is a fully accessible public space in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens, attracting up to 250,000 visitors every Summer and is accompanied by an ambitious programme of public talks and events.

Frank Gehry

Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In subsequent years, Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia. His work has earned him several of the most significant awards in the architectural field, including the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture), the Praemium Imperiale Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Friedrich Kiesler Prize, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. Recent projects include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; Maggie’s Centre, a cancer patient care centre in Dundee, Scotland; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Some current projects include the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer Center in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Princeton Science Library in Princeton, New Jersey; the Hall Winery in Napa Valley, California; and the Puente de Vida Museo in Panama City, Panama.

Arup

Arup has worked on many of the Pavilions commissioned by Julia Peyton-Jones. Arup collaborated with Gehry Partners LLP to help evaluate the design strategies, choice of materials and structural typology of the 2008 Pavilion. Arup is also providing the engineering and specialist design on the project. The Arup team includes David Glover, Ed Clark with Cecil Balmond.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000. It is an ongoing programme of temporary structures by internationally acclaimed architects and individuals. It is unique worldwide and presents the work of an international architect or design team who, at the time of the Serpentine Gallery's invitation, has not completed a building in England. The Pavilion architects to date are: Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, 2007; Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup, 2006; Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Arup, 2005; MVRDV with Arup, 2004 (un-realised); Oscar Niemeyer, 2003; Toyo Ito with Arup, 2002; Daniel Libeskind with Arup, 2001; and Zaha Hadid, 2000. Each Pavilion is sited on the Gallery’s lawn for three months and the immediacy of the process - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a peerless model for commissioning architecture.

This year the project management of the Pavilion is being provided for the Serpentine Gallery by Jonathan Harper, Joanna Streeten and Tim Morse at Savant.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008:

Advisors:
Arup
Stanhope

Project Management: Savant


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry
© Gehry Partners LLP 2008


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry
© Gehry Partners LLP 2008

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20 June, 2008

Taylor Woodrow lifts 30-tonne columns into position as work starts on the construction of Frank Gehry 2008 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

Frank Gehry's first project in England started taking shape this week when Taylor Woodrow lifted the first part of the architect's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion into position.

The 16m-high structure, designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup, will be anchored by four massive steel columns and is made up of large timber planks and a complex network of overlapping glass planes.

On Wednesday two cranes were used to simultaneously lift the 30-tonne columns carefully into place. These will form the principle support for the Pavilion.

The next stage of the build is the installation and assembly of the glass canopy, which will begin at the end of this week and take approximately one week to complete.


Work starts on Frank Gehry's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

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Source from
www.serpentinegallery.org

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry
20 July – 19 October

Construction work has begun on the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, which will give England the first built project by legendary architect Frank Gehry, opening 20 July. The spectacular structure – designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup – is anchored by four massive steel columns and is comprised of large timber planks and a complex network of overlapping glass planes that create a dramatic, multi-dimensional space. Gehry and his team took inspiration for this year’s Pavilion from a fascinating variety of sources including the elaborate wooden catapults designed by Leonardo da Vinci as well as the striped walls of summer beach huts. Part-amphitheatre, part-promenade, these seemingly random elements will make a transformative place for reflection and relaxation by day, and discussion and performance by night.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion series, now entering its ninth year, is the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, and is one of the most anticipated events in the international design calendar.

Frank Gehry said: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate. As the visitor walks through the Pavilion they have access to terraced seating on both sides of the urban street. In addition to the terraced seating there are five elevated seating pods, which are accessed around the perimeter of the Pavilion. These pods serve as visual markers enclosing the street and can be used as stages, private viewing platforms and dining areas.”

Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director said:
“It is an exciting moment that work has begun on Frank Gehry’s visionary scheme. His Pavilion is remarkable and will be a landmark for London this summer.”

The Pavilion will be the architect’s first built structure in England. He is collaborating for the first time with his son Samuel Gehry. Since 2001, Peter Rogers, Director of Stanhope, has donated his expertise to all aspects of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions and he continues to play a major role. The Pavilion is a fully accessible public space in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens, attracting up to 250,000 visitors every Summer and is accompanied by an ambitious programme of public talks and events.

Frank Gehry
Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In subsequent years, Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia. His work has earned him several of the most significant awards in the architectural field, including the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture), the Praemium Imperiale Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Friedrich Kiesler Prize, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. Recent projects include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; Maggie’s Centre, a cancer patient care centre in Dundee, Scotland; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Some current projects include the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer Center in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Princeton Science Library in Princeton, New Jersey; the Hall Winery in Napa Valley, California; and the Puente de Vida Museo in Panama City, Panama.

Arup
Arup has worked on many of the Pavilions commissioned by Julia Peyton-Jones. Arup collaborated with Gehry Partners LLP to help evaluate the design strategies, choice of materials and structural typology of the 2008 Pavilion. Arup is also providing the engineering and specialist design on the project. The Arup team includes David Glover, and Ed Clark with Cecil Balmond.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000. It is an ongoing programme of temporary structures by internationally acclaimed architects and individuals. It is unique worldwide and presents the work of an international architect or design team who, at the time of the Serpentine Gallery's invitation, has not completed a building in England. The Pavilion architects to date are: Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, 2007; Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup, 2006; Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Arup, 2005; MVRDV with Arup, 2004 (un-realised); Oscar Niemeyer, 2003; Toyo Ito with Arup, 2002; Daniel Libeskind with Arup, 2001; and Zaha Hadid, 2000. Each Pavilion is sited on the Gallery’s lawn for three months and the immediacy of the process - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a peerless model for commissioning architecture.
This year the project management of the Pavilion is being provided for the Serpentine Gallery by Jonathan Harper, Joanna Streeten and Tim Morse at Savant.

Serpentine Gallery Park Nights
Park Nights is a programme of events that runs between July and October in and around the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Frank Gehry. Park Nights includes Friday and Saturday night talks, performances, music, film screenings in the Pavilion and on a 50-foot open-air screen. The programme will culminate in October with a marathon from the Gallery’s acclaimed series, conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist,
Serpentine Gallery Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects: Manifestos for the 21st Century – Futurological Congress.


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry
© Gehry Partners LLP 2008


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008
Designed by Frank Gehry
© Gehry Partners LLP 2008

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Posted by Marcus Fairs
March 27th, 2008

Here are a couple of model photos of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry.

The pavilion will be built beside the Serpentine Gallery in London this summer and is the latest in a series of temporary pavilions designed by architects including Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas.

See our stories on last year’s pavilion, designed by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Kjetil Thorsen of Snøhetta, starting here. See all the previous pavilions on the Serpentine Gallery’s website here.

Images are © Gehry Partners LLP 2008. Here’s the press release from the Serpentine Gallery:
–

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 will give London the first example of Frank Gehry’s spectacular architecture. The highly articulated structure – designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup – comprises large timber planks and multiple glass planes that soar and swoop at different angles to create a dramatic multi-dimensional space. Part-amphitheatre, part-promenade, these seemingly random elements will make a transformative place for reflection and relaxation by day, and discussion and performance by night.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion series, now entering its ninth year, is the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind, and is one of the most anticipated events in the international design calendar.
Frank Gehry said: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate. As the visitor walks through the Pavilion they have access to terraced seating on both sides of the urban street. In addition to the terraced seating there are five elevated seating pods, which are accessed around the perimeter of the Pavilion. These pods serve as visual markers enclosing the street and can be used as stages, private viewing platforms and dining areas.”

Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, said: “Frank Gehry has designed an extraordinary Pavilion that opens up unexpected vistas to the Gallery, and the Park. It is a visionary scheme.”

The Pavilion will be the architect’s first built structure in England. He collaborated for the first time with his son Samuel Gehry.

Since 2001, Peter Rogers, Director of Stanhope, has donated his expertise to all aspects of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions and he continues to play a major role.

The Pavilion is a fully accessible public space in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens, attracting up to 250,000 visitors every Summer and is accompanied by an ambitious programme of public talks and events.

Frank Gehry

Raised in Toronto, Canada, Frank Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In subsequent years, Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia. His work has earned him several of the most significant awards in the architectural field, including the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Wolf Prize in Art (Architecture), the Praemium Imperiale Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Friedrich Kiesler Prize, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. Recent projects include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; Maggie’s Centre, a cancer patient care centre in Dundee, Scotland; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Some current projects include the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer Center in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Princeton Science Library in Princeton, New Jersey; the Hall Winery in Napa Valley, California; and the Puente de Vida Museo in Panama City, Panama.

Arup

Arup has worked on many of the Pavilions commissioned by Julia Peyton-Jones. Arup collaborated with Gehry Partners LLP to help evaluate the design strategies, choice of materials and structural typology of the 2008 Pavilion. Arup is also providing the engineering and specialist design on the project. The Arup team includes David Glover, Ed Clark with Cecil Balmond.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion commission was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000. It is an ongoing programme of temporary structures by internationally acclaimed architects and individuals. It is unique worldwide and presents the work of an international architect or design team who, at the time of the Serpentine Gallery’s invitation, has not completed a building in England. The Pavilion architects to date are: Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, 2007; Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, with Arup, 2006; Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Arup, 2005; MVRDV with Arup, 2004 (un-realised); Oscar Niemeyer, 2003; Toyo Ito with Arup, 2002; Daniel Libeskind with Arup, 2001; and Zaha Hadid, 2000. Each Pavilion is sited on the Gallery’s lawn for three months and the immediacy of the process - a maximum of six months from invitation to completion - provides a peerless model for commissioning architecture. 
This year the project management of the Pavilion is being provided for the Serpentine Gallery by Jonathan Harper, Joanna Streeten and Tim Morse at Savant.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008:

Advisors: 
Arup
, Stanhope

Project Management: 
Savant

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The new Serpentine Pavilion will be Frank Gehry's first project in England. Jay Merrick explains why it's a builder's nightmare – and an architect's dream

Wednesday, 9 July 2008

Alan Williams, a burly subcontractor, gazes up at the jut and splay of the giant, out-of-whack pillars and beams rising from behind the soft frieze of horse chestnut trees along the West Carriage Drive of Hyde Park, London. "Yeah! No problem!" he yells into his cellphone. "I'll get the forklift round!" Through an almost orientally delicate site fence can be glimpsed the bits and pieces – and those are entirely appropriate words – of Frank Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion, the architect's first building in England. It is an exuberantly deranged pleasure dome, yet another Gehry cavern made measureless to man. When he visits his creation today, he may well be reminded of the architectural scenes that originally convinced him to design buildings.

"Nightmare!" confides young Williams. "The logistics, just to get the glazing panels into place. Two mill out at the first joint, and you're 20mm out at the other end! Nightmare!"

The reverse, actually: a dream, a strange will to architectural joy that has occupied Gehry's emotions and mind since 1978, when he re-designed his unremarkable Santa Monica home and studio in such an extraordinarily hang-loose way that the lexicon of architecture's visual, spatial and even linguistic moves could fully admit the word that had always informed much abstract art, and was beginning to infiltrate "cool" philosophy and architecture: deconstruction.

The blunter, richer point about Gehry's pavilion is that its deconstructivist manner also makes you think about its obverse: actual physical construction and building materials, one kind of stuff jammed up against another kind of stuff; which, in turn, forces you to consider the fundamental properties and meanings of his architectural forms and spaces. There is not always an obvious form, so what are we looking at? There are no distinctly demarcated spaces and thresholds, so what are we experiencing?

Perhaps we're experiencing something of what the young Ephraim Owen Goldberg (Gehry's original name) felt when his grandmother encouraged him to create structures out of chips and curls of wood on the floor of his grandfather's carpenter's shop in Toronto. Gehry, who set the template for the phenomena known as "starchitects" when he designed the Bilbao Guggenheim museum, is ultimately a maker; a crafter who wants to release space, or deform it in ways as literally flaky as the nine huge glazing panels of the Serpentine Pavilion that slice the air above its quirkily processional volume in various angles and asymmetric overlaps. The glassy ensemble resembles nothing less than shards of parmesan strewn across a momentarily non-existent risotto.

Yet the pavilion is not an exercise in irony; nor is it gormlessly "lively". The architecture is not scenographic in any obvious way, but it is a kind of mise en scène, a stage that acts itself out. It engages us humanely, and self-critically; it invokes abstruse qualities of time and space, and expresses a morality based on a desire to absorb and re-express influences, activities, emotions – and the implicit risk of creation.

Gehry's pavilion is essentially honest architecture. The building conveys the critique and sheer fun of his personal engagement with turf in Hyde Park that becomes architecturally hallowed ground every summer: Gehry joins a roster of pavilionistas who have included Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, and Alvaro Siza. The pavilion also reveals his obsession with drawing, model-making, art, craft, and the hand-eye coordination that he says is key to his work. The structure not only forces you to reconsider architectural form and materiality, but the reasons for architecture in the first place. As the equally great architect, and historian, Rafael Moneo puts it, Gehry's architecture has "little to do with the fractures, fissures and folds that characterise a good part of contemporary architecture. The abstraction underlying those experiences is giving way to a new organicism, a new image of architecture, an architecture more aligned with orientations in favour of life."

That last phrase, in favour of life, nails it; so, too, might another phrase: what if? For there's no doubt that the Serpentine Pavilion's angles and sliced volumes have been generated by an open hand unafraid of arbitrary, self-provoking exploratory moves designed to conjure figuration and image that produce architecture like an ambiguous stop-frame that somehow seems about to jerk brusquely into cathartic movement; jerkily at first, and then reconfiguring into another form entirely. The pavilion is a denial not only of entropy and collapse, but of contemporary notions of urban junkspace, and the psycho-physical decompositions that the science-fiction writer Philip K Dick once referred to as "kipple".

How eerie to think that the only building in Britain that might be compared with Gehry's pavilion is Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum of the North, in Manchester, itself a kind of kipple. Instead of playfully floating shards or abstracted wings, Libeskind's architecture is fixated on the vision of a shattered globe, rearranged. Where Gehry's pavilion deploys geometry and structure in a loose and absolutely revealed physical sense, Libeskind's structure is an occult, unsettling riddle, a vast ferroconcrete vault and headstone. It is probably unreasonable to compare two buildings with such different purposes and scales. Yet architecture must communicate something more than geometry or mass; and however potent its message, it must generate a sense of further possibility beyond the architect's original creative intentions.

Gehry achieves this in Hyde Park, and he does so with an architecture that is baroque in the way it interrupts and modulates volume and light. The pavilion's formal brusqueness – the structure, connections and glazing panels are deliriously crude – is a return to the wit and spatial and material overlaps of the architect's seminal Santa Monica house; and it is apt to judge the pavilion and the building site as one entity. And the activity around it, too. For this is what really attracted the young, unknown Gehry of the 1950s to architecture – the building sites of the great California modernist architects, such as Pierre Koenig and Richard Neutra; Gehry loved the way they strode around those sites barking orders, making architecture happen. Architecture as messy, shit-happens action-art, rather than the super-cool monochrome depictions of these modernist icons by, say, Julius Schulman.

For Gehry, it was never just about architecture with a capital A. When he accepted the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1989, he revealed the intent and content of his architecture. "My artist friends, people like Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, Ed Kienholz, Claes Oldenburg, were working with very inexpensive materials – broken wood and paper, and they were making beauty," he said. "These were not superficial details, they were direct, it raised the question of what was beautiful. I chose to use the craft available, and to work with the craftsmen and make a virtue out of their limitations. Painting had an immediacy which I craved for architecture. I explored the processes of raw construction materials to try giving feeling and spirit to form.

"In trying to find the essence of my own expression, I fantasised the artist standing before the white canvas deciding what was the first move. I called it the moment of truth. Architecture must solve complex problems. We must understand and use technology, we must create buildings which are safe and dry, respectful of context and neighbours, and face all the myriad of issues of social responsibility, and even please the client. But then what? The moment of truth, the composition of elements, the selection of forms, scale, materials, colour, finally, all the same issues facing the painter and the sculptor. Architecture is surely an art."

The hard-hatted Alan Williams may think otherwise. "I've heard a French hotelier's bought this," he says, gazing up at the rain-spangled structure and canopies. "He's going to put it up in the South of France. Good luck to him." Perhaps the hotelier's contractors will experience something of Claes Oldenburg's declaration: "I make my work out of my everyday experiences, which I find as perplexing and extraordinary as can be."

Frank Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion is open to the public from 20 July to 19 October. Media partner 'The Independent'

The art of success
Elisa Bray

That the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park is one of the most high-profile and successful non-commercial contemporary art galleries – and certainly one of Britain's most glamorous and glitzy galleries – is the work of Julia Peyton-Jones. Since she was appointed director in 1991, Peyton-Jones has overseen a major refurbishment of the gallery, and established its place as a favourite among the country's most fashionable art-lovers.

In June 1994 the Princess of Wales was photographed at the Serpentine Gallery's annual fund-raising gala dressed in a black chiffon dress with plunging neckline – it was the same night that Prince Charles confirmed his adultery on television. Getting Princess Diana on board as patron was a sharp move; the glamorous image stuck.

Peyton-Jones started her career in the art world as a student of painting at the Royal College of Art before becoming curator at London Southbank's Hayward Gallery in 1988. Throughout her Serpentine directorship, she has been the mastermind of several pioneering programmes. In 2000 she initiated the annual summer pavilion in Kensington Gardens, commissioning a series of works from leading architects, including Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Last year saw a collaboration between the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen. The helter-skelter they installed had a ramped walkway leading to its peak that gave visitors impressive views of the park and gallery.

The same year, Peyton-Jones, who counts Damien Hirst as a close friend, also started up a club for affluent under-39s keen to learn about and buy contemporary artworks. For the annual sum of £1,000, members of Future Contemporaries have access to a programme of art education including personal insights from leading contemporary artists into their work. Peyton-Jones was appointed OBE in 2003.


The building as it is now in London's Hyde Park


Lines of beauty: a model of Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion

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By: Nicholas Glass

The architect behind the Bilbao Guggenheim, Frank Gehry, shows off his first structure in England, a special installation at London's Serpentine Gallery.

The architect behind the Bilbao Guggenheim, Frank Gehry, shows off his first structure in England, a special installation at London's Serpentine Gallery.

Inspired by Da Vinci's catapult and the striped walls of beach huts in summer: the world renowned architect Frank Gehry has unveiled his first structure in England, a temporary pavilion in London's Hyde Park.

Best known for the swooping, gleaming curves of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Gehry is the latest 'starchitecht' to design the Serpentine Gallery pavilion.

His wood, glass and steel creation will remain open until mid-October.

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Maev Kennedy
Wednesday July 9, 2008
guardian.co.uk


Frank Gehry stands in front of his Serpentine pavilion, which will be completed in mid-July. Photograph: Nils Jorgenson / Rex

The Bilbao effect has landed in that well-known centre of urban deprivation and grime, the smooth green lawns of Kensington Gardens. The architect Frank Gehry has been headhunted by city authorities all over the world since 1997, when his gleaming, wriggling Guggenheim Bilbao museum was credited with transforming the economy of the rundown post-industrial Spanish port. ("That's bullshit," he said modestly today.) Now he is within days of completing his first building in England, the temporary summer pavilion for the Serpentine gallery, which is becoming one of the starriest and worst paid commissions in the arts world.

Every year, some world-renowned architect whimpers on learning that Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery's famously formidable director, is on the phone. It has already happened to Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas and Oscar Niemeyer. The results have been spectacular though. Richard Rogers, though probably feeling blessed that he's ineligible - to qualify, the designer must never have completed a building in England - says: "I couldn't single one out that I have liked more than the others - they have all been masterpieces."

This year it was Gehry's turn; apart from an aborted seaside tower project for Hove, he has never worked in England, and his only British building is the cancer care Maggie's Centre in Dundee.

Resistance is futile. Hiding under the desk, or merely claiming to be insanely busy - Gehry is also working on projects in Las Vegas, Princeton, Napa Valley, Panama and Spain - doesn't help.

"It's an expensive yes, I can tell you," he groaned yesterday. "Will I get into heaven for that?"

"Absolutely," Peyton-Jones assured him, "and the angels will serenade you on your arrival."

In the mere six months between first pencil scribble to next week's opening night concert, including getting planning permission, Gehry designed a spectacular tangle of glass, Douglas fir timber and steel, supported on four massive columns that would shoot up from the smooth lawn outside the gallery to a height of 16m. His youngest son Samuel, recently qualified as an architect and now working in his office, looked at the result and asked why he didn't do something a bit wilder.

"I had to go away for work, and when I came back he had hung these butterflies flying through the model - I thought that was really fantastic, so that's the effect we've tried to get with the roof."

The whole design duly got a twist, the massive glass roof sections apparently tilting and sliding, the huge timber beams canted as if about to roll off their supporting columns. It was the job of Ed Clark of Arup Engineering to make sure it stood up: "tricky", he said yesterday, sucking his teeth like any jobbing builder asked for an estimate.

Like its predecessors, the space will function as a cafe by day and a party and events space by night. Standing under an umbrella, occasionally sneezing gently, Gehry admitted yesterday that he had perhaps not fully considered the celebrated English summer. An earlier stage of the design had tarpaulin covers that could be pulled over the frame to give some shelter. "They may have to go back," he said, sighing.


Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Architect Frank Gehry's pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London opens to the public on July 20, 2008. Have a look at the project as it nears completion


Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The commission is highly prized in the architectural community but is not as lucrative as other work they could be doing at that time, a decision Gehry calls 'an expensive yes'


Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Glass, Douglas fir timber and steel comprise the design - as the pavilion is temporary, Gehry felt he could use some temporary materials. Remarkably, from first designs to the opening night concert, the project has taken only six months


Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Benches inside the structure mean it will provide a popular relief from the excesses of the British summer, and the pavilion will, as with previous years, house a cafe


Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The idea started with a simple catapult image, then evolved into an attempt to create a picture of butterflies moving in the roof


Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex
Britain is strangely bereft of Gehry's work - the Maggie's Centre in Dundee is the only existing example of his style we have, despite his acclaimed work on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has been credited with reinvigorating the local economy


Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex
With typical equanimity, Gehry dismisses such praise as 'bullshit'. He is already working on the next creation, with projects underway in Las Vegas, Princeton, Napa Valley, Panama and Spain

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Source from 中廣新聞 via 新浪新聞

中廣新聞網 (2008-07-10 15:30)

這幾年，做都市規劃的人喜歡談「畢爾包效應」，認為一做建築可以替一個地區帶來財富。不過，設計「畢爾包古根漢」美術館的美國建築師「蓋瑞」說，「畢爾包效應」是胡說八道。

十一年前，「蓋瑞」替西班牙分離分子大本營「巴斯克」地區的畢爾包設計了一座外牆像魚鱗的古根漢美術館。總經費一億美金，完工一年就還本，還連帶的改變了大家對「巴斯克」的印象。很多負責都市規劃人看到投資報酬回收這麼快，效果又這麼好，紛紛起而效尤，都吵著要蓋「古根漢」。

「蓋瑞」說，當初畢爾包當局找他們，想法很複雜。他們原來想蓋一個雪梨歌劇院。後來又決定要改造整個社區。英國設計師「福斯特」設計了地鐵，「斯特靈」又設計了車站，不過，後來沒蓋。

「蓋瑞」說，畢爾包當局的目的是要改變整個社區。美術館做到了。整件事就這麼簡單，沒有所謂一棟房子帶來財富的「畢爾包效應」。

[archiz]

所以不是因為"古根漢"的關係,是因為蓋了個美術館,,,這句話的意思是
只要是美術館,就可以做到,跟誰誰做或誰經營的都無關?
如果不是建築本身的可看性極高或是換人做做,社區都會走到現在的狀況?

"畢爾包當局的目的是要改變整個社區。美術館做到了。整件事就這麼簡單，沒有所謂一棟房子帶來財富的「畢爾包效應」。"

這是建築師的謙虛,還是摧毀政客利用公共建設建立功績的一句話阿~~??!!

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Source from


10 July, 2008

By Emily Cadman

Frank Gehry's much anticipated first structure in England, his summer installation at the Serpentine Gallery in central London’s Hyde Park, was unveiled to the press on Wednesday in monsoon-like conditions.

The structure comprises four massive steel columns – clad in Douglas fir timber – and a complex network of overlapping glass planes inspired, according to Gehry, by butterflies.

Gehry was reluctant to talk about his inspiration or design process for the building, simply saying: "What I have to say is outside".

But when pushed, he invoked the spirit of traditional English gardens. "I was thinking of garden parties, the warmth of timber, of stripes in garden pavilions," he mused.

He suggested the form of the building was a reaction to the proliferation of computer-designed buildings, saying: "So much architecture now is designed in a computer… I see shapes that are recognisable from those programs, so maybe in a way this is a bit of a reaction – but not an angry reaction".

In the pouring rain and with workmen sawing away, the building didn’t perhaps look at its best or appear as fluid as other Gehry structures, but it did possess a distinct grandeur.

Like all Serpentine installations, it has taken only six months from invitation to completion. For the next three months, it will house a series of evening talks and events, with a café and viewing access during the day.

Gehry's only other building in the UK to date is a Maggie's Centre in Scotland.


Architect's Statement

"The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street from the park to the existing gallery. Inside the pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior space from wind and rain, and provide shade for sunny days.

"The pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to server as a place for live performances of music and art. As visitors walk through the pavilion, they have access to terraces seating on both sides of the urban street.

"In addition to the terraced seating, there are two elevated seating pods which are accessed around the perimeter of the pavilion. These pods serve as visual markers, enclosing the street, and are used as private viewing and dining areas."


Gehry's Serpentine installation under construction
Gehry's Serpentine installation, which was designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup, under construction
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Photo credit: 2008 Gehry Partners LLP


Gehry's Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles
Gehry's Serpentine installation, which was designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup, under construction
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Photo credit: 2008 Gehry Partners LLP

Watch Channel Four's report on the Gehry's installation

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Source from


July 21st, 2008
Posted by Marcus Fairs



The Serpentine Gallery in London has published a few photos of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry.



The temporary pavilion opened yesterday (Sunday) and remains open to the public until October 19.



The photos here are by Iwan Baan and are copyright © 2008 Gehry Partners LLP.



See model shots of the pavilion plus the Serpentine Gallery’s press release including a statement by Gehry - plus a whole load of comments from Dezeen readers - in our earlier story.



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Source from


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 by Frank Gehry 2
July 21st, 2008

Posted by Rose Etherington


Here’s some more pictures of Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, taken by photographer Luke Hayes.



The pavilion in London opened yesterday (see previous story) and remains open to the public until 19 October.



See model shots of the pavilion plus the Serpentine Gallery’s press release including a statement by Gehry in our earlier story.






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Source from Flickr Search

[filip]

Source from


21 July, 2008

By Tony McIntyre

Frank Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion combines grandeur with history, but Tony McIntyre has issues with its structural honesty

The whole idea of the Serpentine pavilion project is for architects to make a splash, which is great because, you know, everyone likes a bit of fun. But what if you’re sitting quietly in the sunshine and the splash is caused by some bonehead water-bombing off the diving board? Is that still fun? Is it churlish to say: enough is enough, get out of the water and act like an adult?

The Serpentine commission follows two rules: only six months from commission to completion and the architect must not have built previously in England. What are we to expect from such restrictions? The essence, the epitome, of an architect’s work? There is good reason to think so. With so little time to act, designers will reach for what they know and are familiar with, if not visually/formally then conceptually/methodically. Overlaying this will be the desire towards boldness and originality, the reputation for which was the reason for their selection in the first place.

At first sight, this year’s commission, designed by Frank Gehry, appears as a giant forest construction: a roof of translucent wings suspended from bundles of meaty square logs, all just falling down a little but showing signs of former formal glory, with two rows of banked seating — again of giant logs — like a church choir, aligned axially on the Serpentine’s roof lantern. Walking along this avenue, the fractured roof and lack of walls strengthen the notion of uncovering a lost civilisation, but since it’s all brand new you know it’s the architect doing this — grand, and civil, and parky, all at once.


Credit: Morley von Sternberg
The inside of Gehry's pavilion has two rows of banked seating

So this is Deep Gehry: wonky beaux arts with a baroque sensibility for spatial relationships; grandeur and history. I like all this. But are there are other issues lurking down there in the bilge?

He describes the pavilion as “a wooden timber structure”, and here is where things start going odd. Only for the briefest of moments do you think the structure is timber (let alone “wooden timber”). Quite clearly the structure is steel, disguised as timber. If you don’t want to show the main steel frame there are many ways of covering it up, from wallpaper to painted foliage to wood — who could object?


The problem here is the effort — the failed effort — to hide the frame. We need irony here, Frank! We don’t need poorly executed suburban cosmetics. By which I mean that everything is meant to deceive you into thinking the structure really is foot-by-foot baulks of Douglas Fir. The reality is only sometimes that, and more often thin planks glued to steel, with short lengths of the solid stuff stuck into at the ends. Why would you do that?

Working with titanium sheet is one thing. Separation of skin and bones is clear, and titanium sheet is the closest we can come to realising those beautiful surface model forms that float before us on our computer screens: insubstantial, fluid, sensual. Foot-square baulks of timber are something else, which should set up their own rules. Here they are obliged to play by rules they cannot possibly follow.

Gehry has never been a stickler for detail. His own house, all those years ago, made a virtue of the so what? DIY approach: just sticking a bit of glass over a crude hole, using glue. It doesn’t translate into the corporate look. From the American Centre in Paris (1994) to the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), to the IAC HQ in New York (2007), squint and it’s okay, but don’t ask for the details to make sense.

Maybe it’s the way the design evolves, from squiggle or visual crib (Leonardo’s catapults, apparently) to full size detailing. Anyone who has seen a Gehry building will know they are at their best from a hundred yards away, or more. Too close and you see the awkward seams, like those bits on cad drawings that look fine at 1:100, but you zoom to life size and, no, dammit: those lines don’t meet after all. So it is here. Get too near and you see where one of the seating baulks has been cut 100mm short, and a whole big bit has been glued onto it with skin-coloured silicone. The angular joints between cladding boards are too ill-fitting to carry the illusion of solidity. Actually, if Leonardo had had steel he would have used that for his catapults. What would that have been like?

That’s one to ponder, but if we ask what a pavilion made from big sections of timber might be like, we do have a contemporary example: Sou Fijimoto’s Next Generation House, in Kamakura, Japan. It’s constructed from, yes, solid baulks of softwood (cedar not fir) in foot-by-foot sections. The game there is the building of complexity through bold and simple elements. Like a log cabin, shorter timbers used where windows and doors are needed, longer timbers projecting into the interior to form seating, tables, beds. It respects the materials it employs. That can’t be said of Gehry’s work, which is squiggle-driven.

Where that gets us is the usual position with this architect: great spaces, compromised intellectually by incoherent use of materials.


Photo credit: Morley von Sternberg


Photo credit: Morley von Sternberg


Photo credit: Morley von Sternberg
Gehry's pavilion rises spectacularly above the surrounding trees