'Digital cloud' settles as sun shines on new Serpentine Gallery pavilion

On a glorious summer’s day, it was the only cloud on view.

But that was always what Serpentine Gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist promised.

The low-lying “cloud” is this summer’s pavilion at the Kensington Gardens gallery where every year since the year 2000 a different architect has been commissioned for the project.

Tokyo-based Sou Fujimoto, who at 41 is the youngest to accept the challenge, unveiled a light and airy design inspired in part by what he sees as a very Japanese affinity with nature. The structure is made from hundreds of 20mm-wide steel poles, creating a grid-like a digital matrix.

As in previous years, the pavilion will host a programme of events, including the annual fundraiser party, culminating in a marathon of talks on the closing weekend in October.

The gallery bosses see the pavilion design as an apt representation of one of the themes of this summer’s programme — the generation of artists born in or after 1989 and raised in the digital age.

Ms Peyton-Jones said Fujimoto’s structure was “a really remarkable thing” — even if it only truly resembles a cloud when seen from the main gallery roof. “It’s a kind of digital cloud, a very visible mass floating in the atmosphere,” she said. Fujimoto grinned as he surveyed his work. “It is really amazingly beautiful. And this morning the weather is amazing. We’re really lucky,” he said.

The pavilion project was one of the most interesting in architecture, he added, in giving architects who have not completed a building in Britain the chance to create a temporary landmark structure: “It was a great surprise that they contacted me. It’s big challenge.”

There have been two Japanese pavilions before — by Toyo Ito with Arup in 2002 and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa four years ago.

The Serpentine Gallery pavilion, until October 20, serpentinegallery.org