Alvaro Siza, along with Eduardo Souto de Moura and Cecil Balmond, has created a giant and febrile carapace. It is the 2005 Serpentine Gallery pavilion, and its design, inspiration and photographic representation are all collected together here in this survey of their latest contribution to this annual installation.
Since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park has invited the world's leading innovative architects to create a pavilion, even an elegance or folly, that represented the ethos of their work. To date Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Oscar Niemeyer have constructed pavilions in the park.
In 2005 the great Portuguese architect Ålvaro Siza, with his former ammanuensis Eduardo Souto de Moura, has created a giant and febrile carapace that occupies the lawn in front of the gallery. The extraordinary engineer Cecil Balmond, of the designers Arup, has realised their ideas. How and why they constructed this unsettling and frankly beautiful space is recorded in Trolley's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005.
Trolley produced the definitive reference work for Oscar Niemeyer's pavilion in 2003, the first and only catalogue produced for the Serpentine Pavilion. The 2005 edition of the pavilion contains an intuitive and incisive interview with Siza and de Moura by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and Stefano Boeri, the editor of Domus, that elucidates their work in progress. It also includes the sketches, whims and detritus of the architects' ideas, the genesis of the building, between December 2004 and the end of January, 2005. Cecil Balmond, too, speaks freely of the two architects and how he came to construct their building.
Beyond the creation of the pavilion, the volume contains important drawings, ideas and discussions of the three principals' work to date. As with the Niemeyer catalogue, also published by Trolley, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005 is much more than a vade mecum for the structure, being a work that will quickly become a point of reference.
