Serpentine's summer pavilion gets a makeover with teeth

His Weather Project installation illuminated the vast Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, drawing huge crowds to bask in its golden "rays". Now, the Danish conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson has turned his attention to the great outdoors.

A monument in the form of a giant spiral, with shard-like "teeth" and rising floors that merge with the walls, was unveiled yesterday by Eliasson and the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen as the 2007 design for the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion.

Every year since 2000, the gallery has commissioned a temporary pavilion, from leading architects such as Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.

At 15 metres high and weighing 90 tonnes, the monument is the largest work to occupy the Kensington Gardens site.

This year's three-storey, steel-and-plywood pavilion, opening in mid-July, is inspired by the idea of moving through space and experiencing form from different perspectives. The pavilion will form the basis of the Park Nights programme, a series of events in which the structure will operate as a laboratory every Friday night.

Through investigations into the physical and perceptual human experience, "people will be able to participate in, and experience, the physicality of vibration and sound through architecture", said the artists.

Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery's director, said although the original pavilion project was conceived as an architectural venture, the Serpentine had tried to expand the design team to include a visual artist last year, with a collaboration between the designers Rem Koolhaus and Cecil Balmond and artist Thomas Demand, who designed a frieze for the pavilion.

"This will bring an extra dimension to the project that already holds a unique place in the innovation of architectural practice," she said.