The Serpentine Gallery has announced Junya Ishigami as the designer of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion. Renderings of the project show a cave-like space enclosed by a canopy roof of slate.
“My design for the Pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasizing a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks,” he said in a statement.
The Japanese architect founded his practice in 2004; previously, he worked for the Pritzker Prize–winning firm SANAA.
Ishigami's designs often blur the line between nature and architecture. Last year, he transformed a once-open meadow in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture into a maze of ponds for Art Biotope, an artists residence and hotel nestled in the town of Nasu. Before that, with Rotterdam-based Studio MAKS, he created the Vijversburg Visitor Center—a slender, three-pronged glass pavilion, which opened in 2017—for a park in a small Dutch town 93 miles northeast of Amsterdam.
Since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned structures from 19 architects and designers, beginning with Zaha Hadid and including Frank Gehry (2008), SANAA (2009), Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei (2012), Francis Kéré (2017), and Frida Escobedo (2018).
Ishigami's 2019 Serpentine Pavilion will open June 20 on the Gallery's lawn in Kensington Gardens in London; it will remain on view through October 6, 2019.
