LONDON.- Build Your Own Pavilion is a nationwide campaign to celebrate architecture and encourage young architects everywhere to design public spaces for the cities of the future. Inspired by the Serpentine Pavilion, the Serpentine’s annual commission of temporary buildings by world-famous architects, Build Your Own Pavilion invites young people aged 8-16 to consider the relationship between architecture and public space and to design the architecture for the cities they would like to live in. The campaign includes a nationwide workshop tour for 8-16 year olds, taking place in cities across the UK, and a series of online digital tools for teachers and children to use in the classroom.

Made possible with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Build Your Own Pavilion is now in its third successful year. Since launching in 2015, the initiative has inspired young people from 11 countries across the globe to design more than 1400 model Pavilions.

The Serpentine Pavilion 2017 is designed by award-winning architect Francis Kéré and is inspired by the tree that serves as a central meeting point for life in his home town of Gando in Burkina Faso. As an architect, he is committed to socially engaged and ecological design in his practice. Building on these ideas, Kéré’s Pavilion has hosted Radical Kitchen, a new weekly series of lunchtime picnic talks exploring questions of community, resilience and rights to the city.

Speaking about the Build Your Own Pavilion campaign, Kéré said: “The starting point in my design process is always the people who will use it, but when it comes to young people, their needs are too often overlooked. Build Your Own Pavilion is an important project because it takes young people's opinions on the built environment seriously. By tapping into their unique sense of creativity, the project inspires children to become socially aware citizens and, hopefully, the architects of our future cities.”

Watch Francis Kéré talking about his approach to designing for children and families in a special video interview for Build Your Own Pavilion, featuring Gando Primary School in Burkina Faso, and the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion.