Serpentine Gallery pavilion opens
Updated on 22 August 2007
This year's Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion was a long time coming. But the temporary structure will be around until November.
The ambitious spinning-top design features a spiralling walkway which loops in and out of the building, with views across Hyde Park.
It proved so technically difficult to build that the July launch was postponed. But it will now be open to the public from Friday.
The Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and the Norwegian architect Kjetill Thorsen have created a pavilion not like a Victorian child's spinning top. And it invites you to climb and climb.
This is a temporary structure, prefabricated in Germany and assembled in just a month.
On one side, decorative nylon ropes; and pretty much every where else, a skin of plywood on a steel frame.
The Scandinavian designers wanted to create something that was somehow unpredictable.
The pavilion isn't supposed to last forever. As you reach the top, you enter the darkness and into a sort of pulpit - and a space to be avoided by vicars or anybody prone to vertigo.
In wintry light, here was an architectural space designed for a cafe and artistic debates.
The Scandanavian designers are both friends and collaborators. They are currently working together on an opera house in Oslo.
Here their ambitions have been relatively modest: a cone-shaped space, and stepped seating for about 300.
They wanted to create something that was somehow unpredictable.
