Book Exhibition Salon| Authenticity—A Dialogue about a Pavilion

Introduction

The annual Serpentine Pavilion, held every summer in Kensington Gardens, London, stands as a focal point of immense anticipation within the architectural community. Since 2000, when British architect Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) was invited to design a “tent” structure for the event, the summer pavilion project has evolved into a regularly commissioned series for the gallery. Notable architects, including Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), and Rem Koolhaas (2006), have contributed to the series. In recent years, emerging talents have also participated, such as the 2017 Pritzker Prize laureate Francis Kéré (2017) and the youngest female architect ever selected, Frida Escobedo (2018). This year, Korean architect Minsuk Cho will present a new design. On this lush green lawn, architects have successively created spaces that distill and reinterpret their signature design vocabularies.

Since the summer of 2014, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s “X-site Project” has seen emerging architects and artist teams unveil unique temporary “constructions” on the outdoor plaza in front of the museum for periods ranging from one to three months. Similar to the origins of the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavilions, the “X-site Project” similarly focuses on experimental temporary spaces, yet it uniquely responds to the public pulse and cohesive nature of urban plazas, presenting a distinctly different character.

This thematic book exhibition, presented by Winsing Art Place, features office one senses (OOS), the Grand Prize winner of the 11th X-site Project (2024) hosted by Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Ting-Tseng Shen, principal architect of Shen Ting-Tseng Architects. Centered on the theme “Authenticity—A Dialogue about a Pavilion,” starting with Analogue Forest displayed on the museum plaza this summer, the exhibition explores, through curated books, how pavilions evolve from ancillary structures into self-contained spaces, spanning art, installation, and architecture.