Books Received

Pavilion Propositions: Nine Points on an Architectural Phenomenon

Since London’s Serpentine Galleries’ former director Julia Peyton-Jones “invented” the pavilion in 2000, the seeds of the archetypal pavilion have spread and germinated all over the world. The exhaustion of pavilions and pavilion programs has led some to ask: have we reached “peak” pavilion?

In this book, authors John Macarthur, Susan Holden, Ashley Paine and Wouter Davidts analyse the phenomenon of the contemporary pavilion, not as an overinflated architectural bubble heading for an unseemly deflation, but rather as a “rare and remarkable” new commonplace that has emerged. The authors offer nine propositions that first rebuke “the adage that the pavilion is an overused and obsolete subject for critical practice and discourse” and then consider the pavilion as a medium through which architecture can take its place among the other cultural arts.

The propositions are largely in the context of the Serpentine Galleries’ annual commission and related programs. Architectural commissions by visual arts institutions have become a strategy for the permanent reinvention of the institution, they argue. At the heart