Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005

Five years ago the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park invited the world's leading architects to design a pavilion, even a folly, that represented the ethos of their work, and to construct it in the gallery's garden. To date Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Oscar Niemeyer have taken them up on the offer. This year the celebrated Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza and his former assistant Eduardo Souto de Moura have built a giant and febrile carapace that spreads over the lawn. Serpentine Pavilion 2005 records how and why they created this unsettling and frankly beautiful space, and charts their progress from its genesis through its virtuoso engineering and construction. The wide range of primary source materials includes an intuitive, incisive interview with Siza and de Moura by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stefano Boeri, and the sketches, whims and detritus of the architects' ideas. It also includes drawings and discussions of the principals' previous work to date.Eduardo/Souto de Moura is the author of 'Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005' with ISBN 9781904563488 and ISBN 1904563481.