Botanica Atlanta | Landscape Design, Construction & Maintenance

This month’s Garden Design published an article that covers a one-of-a-kind art experience that is put on annually in London, England. One of the city’s prominent art museums, the Serpentine Gallery, sets up a temporary pavilion on its lawn every year. The pavilion lawn is adjacent to Kensington Gardens, which was once a private, palatial garden and is now one of the largest public green spaces in central London. The magazine article, appropriately titled “Summer Temp,” highlights Peter Zumthor, the internationally renowned Swiss architect who was selected to design this year’s pavilion, and the article gives a description of the structure that he created.

Images: Garden Design

In his own words, Zumthor articulates the inspiration for his pavilion in the following sentences:

“A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.

The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky. Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens that I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the façades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.”

Images: John Offenbach

I find Zumthor’s pavilion design intriguing, and I find the emphasis that this architect has placed on the garden to be novel. From my interpretation of his writing, the garden stands at the center of his concept, and his entire pavilion symbolically protects this green heart. His writing and the pictures of his pavilion are quite remarkable, and I can only imagine what it might be like to explore it and appreciate it in person.

After reading this article, I started thumbing through images of pavilions from previous years. There were two observations about the Serpentine Gallery’s Pavilion project that I found especially noteworthy. The first is that, despite the fact that these structures only stand on the museum lawn for a few months, their character is quite permanent. Built of such durable materials as steel, concrete, glass, and wood, the construction and subsequent dismantlement seems quite demanding. This hard work, though, is not done in vain, as the yearly visitation can be as high a 250,000 visitors in just one summer season.

The second and most remarkable characteristic of these pavilions is that each architect who was selected has come up with an unprecedented, truly creative work. Looking at the eleven pavilions that have been built since the Gallery’s tradition began in 2000, it is hard to draw any comparisons among them. Not one has resembled a pavilion that came before it.

Images: World Architecture News, Philippe Ruault, Hélène Binet, and Love Architecture

The pavilion architects are unhindered by most of the basic programming demands that typically thwart the full realization of a designer’s vision. Such concerns as bathrooms, fire escapes, HVAC systems, and broom closets, which are requirements of habitable structures, are not required in these pavilions, and the result is a fluid, pure expression of an architectural concept. The finished product is bold and beautiful, albeit fleeting. But I believe that, though the walls come crashing down after a period of weeks, the architectural experience of each pavilion lives on in the sensual memory of each visitor for years to come.

Images: Iqbal Aalam, Love Architecture, and Iwan Baan

Author: Sam Valentine, BLA, LEED AP