Building a buzz

The annual city-wide celebration of architecture returns for the entire month of June with over 200 activities stretching across every corner of London.

Architecture lovers are spoilt for choice in June when the annual London Festival of Architecture returns with a month of talks, walks, events and exhibitions.

Since it launched 12 years ago, LFA has helped transform the perception of architecture from a niche interest to a vital element of the capital’s economic, social and financial framework.

One of the festival’s hottest is a talk on Ballymore’s Sky Pool at Embassy Gardens by Hal Currey and Brian Eckersley, the architect and engineer respectively.

This will be the first public talk on the ground -breaking Sky Pool since it was unveiled last summer and a chance to quiz the designers on some of the challenges of spanning two buildings 35 metres in the air.

Then, on June 17th Huw Morgan, the landscape architect, will be giving a talk about the Embassy Gardens section of Nine Elms Gardens. Inspired by New York’s “high line” linear park, his presentation will be at the Embassy Gardens marketing suite that has been landscaped to represent how the park will look when it is completed in 2017.

June is also the month when the annual Serpentine Pavilion opens, introducing visitors to an architect who has not yet built in the UK before.

This year’s pavilion is designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) which is known for its forward-thinking concepts and exciting ideas.

Conceived as a wall of fibreglass that “unzips” or splits open to reveal a three-dimensional space, during the day it will be used as a café and free family activities while at night it becomes the venue for the Serpentine’s Park Nights programme of performance works by artists, writers and musicians.

If pavilions are your thing be sure to head down to Kew Gardens where the Hive, the UK’S award winning pavilion will be taking up permanent residence from June 18th.

Standing 17 metres in the air, the Hive is described as an immersive, multi-sensory experience inspired by ground-breaking UK scientific research into the health of bees.

But it’s no ordinary hive. The 40 tonne lattice structure is animated by hundreds of glowing LED lights while vibration sensors within a real beehive trigger musical sounds giving a fascinating insight into the ever-moving life of a bee colony.

Pavilion’s photography credit: Iwan Baan