Australian Design Review

French architect Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design this year’s architecture pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park.

The Pritzker Prize winner will construct a bright red pavilion featuring table tennis tables, an auditorium and an angled 12m wall tilting over the space. The pavilion will be made from steel, glass, fabric and plastic.

Nouvel’s pavilion will be the tenth in the series of temporary pavilions installed each summer outside the Serpentine Gallery. The gallery commissions international architects who have not previously built work in the United Kingdom, to construct a temporary structure in the gardens of the gallery.

Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery, said the pavilions attract 250,000 visitors a year, saying: “The public own the structure as soon as they can get into it… They can engage with the work of architects who will be in the canon in a hands-on way that would never be possible anywhere else in the world.”

In 2009, Japanese duo SANAA designed a pavilion consisting of a series of poles and reflective aluminium surfaces. Other notable architects to have been involved in the series include Frank Gehry, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito and Daniel Libeskind.

Nouvel received the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 2008, with jurors noting a “persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation” in his work. He is known for projects including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Torre Agbar in Barcelona and the Copenhagen Concert Hall. He is also currently working on high profile projects including a branch of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi and an apartment tower in New York.

Nouvel’s first built work in the UK is due for completion later this year. One New Change, a retail and office complex located near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, will be clad in red, grey and beige anti-reflective glass. The project was the overall winner at the AR/MIPIM Future Projects Awards, announced in February 2010.

First reported in ["The Times Online":http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article7071792.ece].