Serpentine Pavilion 2013

The thirteenth summer pavilion for the gallery was designed by a Japanese architect who was, at 41, the youngest to take on the commission. His work draws on organic structures such as the forest, the nest and the cave, and sits between nature and artifice.

The pavilion is a delicate lattice of 20 mm steel poles. Light and semi-transparent, it blends like a cloud into the park and against the classical colonnade of the gallery behind.

The architect described it as an architectural landscape: a transparent terrain that invites people to explore the site in many ways. The greenery around it is woven together with a built geometry, so that natural and man-made meet in something neither purely architectural nor purely natural.

The grid becomes seats, steps and platforms at different heights, and clear polycarbonate discs set among the poles keep off the rain. Through its four months in the park, the flexible space held a café and many kinds of gathering.