Into Thin Air

While most structures are firmly rooted in the ground, some seem to float through the skies
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From Architectural Record
Josephine Minutillo

A cloud over London

In what has become a tradition for the Serpentine Gallery, this summer witnessed the construction of the ninth Serpentine Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens. The design for the temporary structure is awarded to an internationally renowned architect who has not yet built in the U.K. Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima of the Japanese firm SANAA got the call this year.

For the Serpentine Pavilion, SANAA insisted on mirrorpolished aluminum for both the underside and top of the roof. The serene park reflections contrast with the animated character created when the space is filled with visitors.

Photo: © Iwan Baan

An early concept sketch illustrates the basic structure.

Drawing: ARUP

The pavilion spreads out over 6,000 square feet inside London's Kensington Gardens.

Photo: © Iwan Baan

 

That the call came in early February, just five months before the pavilion was to be erected on the gallery's nearby lawn, meant that the Tokyo-based SANAA and engineering firm SAPS, collaborating with London-based Arup, had to work fast to design, fabricate, and assemble a structure that would contain spaces for a café and an auditorium where performances, talks, film screenings, and poetry readings are presented from July through October.

Given the packed program of events and London's inclement weather, SANAA quickly abandoned its initial idea not to make architecture at all. But the architects' desire to keep the structure as ethereal as possible led to a design that essentially consisted of a very thin, very shiny roof on lots of little sticks.

"SANAA wanted the roof to be 1⁄2 inch thick; We were aiming for 2 inches," says Ed Clark, Arup's project director. "They got closer to their target than we did." But although SANAA's vision included a solid aluminum roof, that presented countless practical challenges, especially when it came time to dismantle the structure. The final roof section - composed of a 3⁄4-inch-thick birch plywood core sandwiched between ultrathin layers of mirror-polished aluminum - came in at just under an inch.

In plan, the amoebalike shape covers 6,000 square feet - "drifting freely between the trees like smoke," according to the architects. But in order to support such a thin surface over an area that large, the designers had to engage in a technically complex exercise for the seemingly simple design.

"We were building endless physical models in Tokyo while the London team was doing computer analysis," recalls Sam Chermayeff, who was SANAA's project architect, along with Lucy Winter Styles. In its final form, the roof structure reaches as high as 111⁄2 feet and dips down as low as 3 feet to reveal to visitors the identical upper surface. Arup used GSA, its own in-house software, to analyze the roof's bending moment. The firm also took advantage of Cecil Balmond's Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) to manipulate the contour lines of the curving, undulant roof.

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record
Originally published in November 2009

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