Serpentine Pavilion 2017, designed by Francis Kéré

Diébédo Francis Kéré, the award-winning architect from Gando, Burkino Faso, has designed the Serpentine Pavilion 2017, responding to the brief with a bold, innovative structure that brings his characteristic sense of light and life to the lawns of Kensington Gardens.

Kéré, who leads the Berlin-based practice Kéré Architecture, is the seventeenth architect to accept the Serpentine Galleries’ invitation to design a temporary Pavilion in its grounds. Since its launch in 2000, this annual commission of an international architect to build his or her first structure in England at the time of invitation has become one of the most anticipated events in the global cultural calendar and a leading visitor attraction during London’s summer season. Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist and CEO Yana Peel made their selection of the architect, with advisors David Adjaye and Richard Rogers. 

Inspired by the tree that serves as a central meeting point for life in his home town of Gando, Francis Kéré has designed a responsive Pavilion that seeks to connect its visitors to nature—and each other. An expansive roof, supported by a central steel framework, mimics a tree’s canopy, allowing air to circulate freely while offering shelter against London rain and summer heat.

The Pavilion has four separate entry points with an open air courtyard in the centre, where visitors can sit and relax during sunny days. In the case of rain, an oculus funnels any water that collects on the roof into a spectacular waterfall effect, before it is evacuated through a drainage system in the floor for later use in irrigating the park. Both the roof and wall system are made from wood. By day, they act as solar shading, creating pools of dappled shadows. By night, the walls become a source of illumination as small perforations twinkle with the movement and activity from inside.

As an architect, Kéré is committed to socially engaged and ecological design in his practice, as evidenced by his award-winning primary school in Burkina Faso, pioneering solo museum shows in Munich and Philadelphia, and his immersive installation in the 2014 exhibition Sensing Spaces at London’s Royal Academy. 

Inspired by Kéré’s stories of gathering, debate and community, the Serpentine Pavilion 2017 will host a new series of weekly community picnic talks, Radical Kitchen. On eight Wednesdays in July and August, a different London group or campaign organisation will assemble in the Pavilion to share their recipes for creating meaningful social change. Forging a connection with food, these picnics will be co-hosted and catered by Mazí Mas, a pop-up restaurant and award-winning social enterprise run by migrant women, which seeks to unearth the flavours of modern London for everyone.

The Pavilion is also the platform for a new summer of Park Nights, the Serpentine’s annual series of experimental and interdisciplinary encounters. Practitioners in the fields of art, architecture, music, film, philosophy and technology have been commissioned to create new, site-specific work in response to Kéré’s structure, offering unique ways of experiencing architecture and performance.

Now in its third year, Build Your Own Pavilion, the digital platform and nationwide architecture campaign conceived with funding support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, invites young people to consider the relationship between architecture and public space, to ask critical questions about the future of their cities and to design the cities in which they would like to live.

The Serpentine’s Architecture Family Pack, designed by artist Katie Schwab, is a chance for children and their families to experience Francis Kéré’s 2017 Pavilion from playful and original perspectives.

Kéré’s design follows Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), whose “unzipped wall” structure was visited by more than 250,000 people in 2016, making it the most visited architecture exhibition in the world in 2016, according to figures in The Art Newspaper.