Summer House
Barkow Leibinger designed the Summer House as part of the Serpentine's Architecture Programme 2016.
Playing with the themes of temporality and the absent house Barkow Leibinger designed a Pavilion in-the-round standing free with all its sides visible. It is conceived as a series of undulating lines constituting bands and forming part of the structure that is reminiscent of a contour drawing (or the act of drawing a form without lifting the pencil up from the paper and only looking at the subject). The logic of generating a structure from loops of ribbon is a self-generating one and comes from a logic of making that is, by coiling material in your hands round and round then stacking the material upon itself.
The new Summer House is organized as four bands of structure beginning with a bench level attached to the ground, a second band of three C-shaped walls crowned by a third and fourth level which forms a roof that cantilevers a tree-like canopy over the smaller footprint de ned by the undulating loops of bench wood. The horizontal banding recalls the layered coursing of Kent’s Summer House albeit its idiosyncratic nature. The Summer House is constructed with plywood skin on a steel tube frame, materials intrinsically in harmony with the looping geometry of the structure.
