Architecture for a summer

As winter comes to a close, a number of international institutions, including London’s Serpentine Gallery and New York’s MoMA have announced the results of design competitions for the construction of temporary summer structures. These temporary installations and pavilions are built to host summer events and programmes that add to the cities’ cultural attractions at peak tourist season.

Small-scale projects such as these offer great opportunities for experimentation with materials, forms and solutions. Architectures that live on in the eternal present of the internet and media reproductions. We have looked at several of them in the pages of Floornature, and here we look at a few of the most important recent projects, to mark the occasion of the announcement of the new projects for summer 2017.

Pride of place goes to the unmissable installations at the Serpentine Gallery in London; the 2017 project is by Diébédo Francis Kéré, preceded in 2016 by BIG and in 2015 by Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of Selgascano.

MoMA PS1 in New York celebrates twenty years of YAP, a programme for young architects. The temporary installation for the summer of 2017 is designed by Jenny Sabin Studio, while in 2016 it was by architects Lazbent Pavel Escobedo and Andres Solíz of Escobedo Soliz Studio, and in 2015 by architect Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation).

MAXXI of Rome also participated in the YAP programme in 2016, with “MAXXI Temporary School: The museum is a school. A school is a Battleground”, an installation designed by Parasite 2.0, and in 2015 with Great Land, a glimpse of the countryside in the city, designed by Corte. MAXXI will not have a new outdoor installation in 2017 because the project is now implemented every two years, so the next one will be in 2018.

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