Hasta La Ideas

Earlier this month we checked in on the progress with SANAA‘s much-anticipated Serpentine Pavilion in London, which is set to open in less than a month in it usual location at Kensington Gardens, on July 12th. And now, because it’s too cool to resist, we make the jump across the pond once again and visit the Times‘ architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff who files this great report, complete with a great slideshow interview, about the pavilion. Although clearly still feeling angry about the recent Prince Charles debacle and starting his first few paragraphs with things like “It says something about the state of British architecture when the highlight of every year is a small pavilion in a park,” Dyckhoff quickly moves on from there and gets into a great discussion with the SANAA team, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, largely (and refreshingly) focusing on their relationship and how they’ve been able to work together for so long.

“When I first saw Sejima-san [they use each other’s surnames despite sitting beside one another and sipping each other’s glass of water], I thought, there’s someone interesting,” he says. “She’d come in to the office wearing this green golden dress with an Arabian Nights hat in rainbow colours. Totally crazy. I thought, she looks kind of nice. I felt she must become very great.”

Despite having read a couple of very negative things about how it is to work for SANAA, this piece at least comes across as very incredibly sweet and makes us even more eager to check out the finished pavilion. In the interim, we’ll have to settle for this small new batch of construction photos posted by Olll.