This year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion will be designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. Radic is fourteenth architect chosen to design a temporary Pavilion in Kensington Gardens and his cloud-like design will follow Sou Fujimoto‘s last year structure. The new structure will occupy a footpring of 350 square meters on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery – this semi-transluscent, cylindrical structure is designed to resemble a shell, resting on large quarry stones.

The new Pavilion is designed with a multi-purpose, flexible social space with a cafe inside. Visitors will enter and interact with the Pavilion in different ways throughout its four months tenure. On Friday nights between July and September, the venue will become the stage for the Galleries’ Park Nights series, which will bring together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory, including three new commissions by emerging artists Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson. AECOM provides engineering and technical design services as it did last year. In addition, AECOM will also be acting as cost and project manager for the 2014 Pavilion.

Radic sees the 2014 Pavilion as a part of the history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies, which were hugely popular from the end of the 16th Century to the start of the 19th. Externally, as he states, the visitor will see a fragile shell suspended on large quarry stones. This shell, white, translucent and made of fiberglass, will house an interior organized around an empty patio, from where the natural setting will appear lower, giving the sensation that the entire volume is floating. At night, thanks to the semi-transparency of the shell, the amber tinted light will attract the attention of passers-by like lamps attracting moths, as stated by the author.