This summer, in celebration of the 15th birthday of the Serpentine Pavilion commission, the Serpentine launches Build Your Own Pavilion: Young Architects Competition – a digital platform and nationwide campaign to celebrate and promote architecture and to educate and encourage young architects everywhere to engage in the challenge of designing Pavilions of the future.
Since 2000, the Serpentine has commissioned some of today’s most renowned architects to create their first built structures in England. Open to the public throughout the summer months, the Serpentine Pavilion offers a pioneering way for audiences to physically experience world-class architecture. After 15 years of ambitious projects, the Serpentine Pavilion has become established as one of the most anticipated events in the global design calendar.
In this first year of Build Your Own Pavilion, young people aged 8 to 14 are invited to submit their Pavilion designs online and at workshops across the UK during the summer of 2015. The platform and workshops will give an insight into the basic principles of architectural design: participants will receive the Pavilion brief and a toolkit that encourages sketching by hand, working with simple modelling materials and progressing to 3D design and print technologies.
The standalone website for the Build Your Own Pavilion campaign will be a place where young people can upload their Pavilion designs to an online gallery, gain insight and learn about the architectural process from the world’s leading architects, download tools for designing and building their own Pavilions, and follow the Build Your Own Pavilion UK tour.
Designs will be judged by a panel of experts, including the Serpentine Directors and the 2015 Pavilion architects selgascano, with a selection of the best designs showcased on the platform and in the media. Overall winners will be selected at the end of the summer.