The Serpentine Gallery has revealed that this year's pavilion will be designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto.
Each year, the Serpentine Gallery invites an architect who has never built in the UK before to design a temporary pavilion in Kensington Gardens. This year it is the turn of Fujimoto, at 44 a (relatively) young architect whose work, which is often inspired by the natural world, is mostly found in his native Japan (although he has technically worked in the capital before, designing the Barbican's Future Beauty exhibition in 2010).
Fujimoto's design for London comprises a 350sq m lattice structure of thin steel poles that will, according to the press release, "blend, cloud-like, into the landscape and against the classical backdrop of the Gallery’s colonnaded East wing". The Japanese certainly appreciate London's nebulous cumulus: the 2009 entry, by Sanaa, also played tricks with the clouds through its reflective surface.
The pavilion opens on 6 June and will be in place until 20 October.
