Delivering the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Sectors
Every year for the last decade the Serpentine Gallery has invited a signature architect, who has never built in the UK, to create a temporary pavilion in Hyde Park. The designs are often fanciful, daring, strange and complex, posing a significant challenge to the construction company commissioned to build them. How do you deliver a definitionally unique architectural structure in just three months, in a working gallery, in a busy public park, to a fixed deadline and budget?
For the past two years Mace has acted as sponsor and project manager on the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. In 2009 the project team started work and quickly realised that the gallery would need a blend of expertise beyond just construction in order to deliver SANAA's complex floating wave design.
Our role stretched from pre-construction advice, fund-raising help, design management, project management, construction, all in a very fluid, adaptable package that had to take account of the gallery's many priorities. In essence we weren't just constructing a building, we were building an event - a piece of construction that would attract the public in large numbers, and which represented the gallery's most intense annual moment in the media spotlight.
Starting right
The first challenge is to figure out how to make the architectural design build-able. We found the suppliers for the various components, at a cost within the gallery's budget. We acted as design managers, ensuring that the architect's vision was protected as we moved off the page and into the live gallery site. With unique and therefore somewhat untested design being at the heart of the pavilion series there are always changes, adaptations to make, despite only have a few weeks to get the job done. Staying on top of this process, finding alternatives, keeping everyone involved in the loop is what made this a successful project.
Delivering uniqueness
Mace has lot of experience on working on one-off projects, from our recent work on the 2010 Shanghai Expo pavilion for the UK FCO, to the forthcoming Transforming Tate Modern. Understandably, dealing wtih challenging architecture and public interfaces is always central to these projects.
With the success of the 2009 pavilion behind us, Mace is once again back at the park to project manage the 2010 Pavilion by French architect Jean Nouvel.
Contact us
To discuss an arts project with our team contact Phil Solomon:
phil.solomon@macegroup.com
+44 (0)7768 071 984
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