The author of the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion 2017 will be Francis Kéré

At yesterday's press conference, Yana Peel and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the main curators of the Serpentine Gallery, celebrated mainly in Africa and Berlin. The designer of the seventeenth summer pavilion in Kensington Gardens will be the fifty-one-year-old African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, who received his education at the Technical University of Berlin, where he has also been running his practice since 1998. Kéré gained wider recognition in 2004 when he received the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the design of a primary school for his hometown village of Gando in West Africa's Burkina Faso.
As advisors in selecting the author of this year's pavilion, the curators of the Serpentine Gallery had the support of prominent London architects David Adjaye and Richard Rogers. A major condition is that the designer must not have had any realizations on British territory before.
Kéré's design is inspired by a tree that represents the center of all life in his home village. The London pavilion will be surrounded by a blue wall decorated with equilateral triangles. The primary supporting structure will consist of a filigree truss made of thin steel wires elevating a circular roof made of wooden slats. The funnel-shaped roof with an exposed center will create a water curtain during rainy weather and highlight this life-giving element.
The seventeenth summer pavilion will be accessible to visitors of Kensington Gardens from June 23 to October 8, 2017. Those who will not have a chance to visit London this summer can still attempt to visit the theater scene that Kéré plans to build this year with Chris Dercon, the former director of Tate Modern, at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.

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