With just one pavilion built every year, this is a prestigious commission offered only to the very best architects. The lucky creator is given a free hand to build an edifice that showcases his or her creative skills. For the eleventh Serpentine Gallery pavilion, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor joins an illustrious list in the pantheon of pavilion architects.

Indeed, such is the attraction of the Serpentine Gallery, for which an auction at Sotheby’s raised GBP 4.5m on the evening before Zumthor’s pavilion opened. The sale – to help finance the creation of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (slated to open in 2012) – featured more than 40 artworks, including by Subodh Gupta, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Susan Hefuna, Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson and Louise Bourgeois. The top sale, John Currin’s oil on canvas Edwardian (2011), raised GBP 713,250.

Zaha Hadid designed the first Serpentine pavilion back in 2000, and was followed by other major names in architecture, such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. As a new book celebrates The Serpentine Gallery pavilions, we pick five of our favourites: 

Zaha Hadid’s pavilion was commissioned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Serpentine Gallery’s Gala event. At that time, Hadid had never built anything in Britain before (a particularly curious anomaly, considering that she had lived there since the mid 1970s). This oddity has since been turned into tradition for pavilion architects. Typically radical, the design she created was a tent-like structure featuring a triangulated roof with sharp angles from ground to floor. Hadid’s temporary design was the first commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, and in retrospect, it can be seen as something of a benchmark that future architects were challenged to measure up to.

Hadid’s success was followed in 2001 by Daniel Libeskind and Toyo Ito (both with Arup) in 2002, which firmly cemented the exhibition in the architectural calendar. Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine, came up trumps again when she commissioned Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer for the 2003 pavilion. Niemeyer, 95 years old at the time, is counted as a key figure in the modern architecture movement in the twentieth century, with acclaimed works around the world, notably in the city of Brasilia. His huge Serpentine pavilion ran to three floors, had a typical Niemeyer sweeping roof and a striking ruby-red ramp. Gently criticised for its exceedingly large scale, his acceptance of the commission nevertheless highlighted how much of an attraction the Serpentine Gallery pavilion had become.

By 2006, and on to its sixth pavilion, Serpentine was seen as a great idea, but also a challenging commission. In a newspaper interview, Julia Peyton-Jones explained: “It's a very, very simple brief that's the same for every architect, and it's up to them to do whatever they will. However, it has a very clear public use: it is a way for the public to experience architecture.” Koolhaas is still considered something of a radical, and his design was as different from his predecessors’ as is possible. A translucent 'ovoid-shaped inflatable canopy' (simpler souls preferred to call it a balloon) was perched atop an amphitheatre, with the canopy rising and dropping, depending on the weather. The effect was most impressive at night, though it presented something of a surreal vision.

Not universally popular among critics, but according to the The Art Newspaper, Nouvel’s pavilion was the world’s fourth most visited architectural exhibition in 2010. Set amid the familiar green parkland, Jean Nouvel’s striking red pavilion was certainly jarring, even more so with its 12-metre tall, acutely angled freestanding wall. The pavilion itself was to be seen as something of a playful structure, complemented by various activities (table tennis) and seating areas (all red, of course).