Since the year 2000 London's Serpentine Gallery has been home to a series of temporary architectural creations. The summer pavilions, by the world's most celebrated architects, are a highlight of the UK's cultural year. But which have best stood the test of time?

The annual Serpentine pavilion is a great achievement based on some dodgy ideas – that architecture can be made into a collectible artwork, and that it can work its magic independent of use or purpose. Also that hiring a famous architect is the same thing as achieving a great building. Also that you can build structures at a speed and in a way that makes considered detail almost impossible without the quality of the finished work suffering. The achievement is that it has created a series of intriguing, sometimes beautiful, occasionally dud structures that have livened up our summers. The series has given glimpses of what architects can do with space, structure, material, light and nature, and the human habitation of these things.

The Serpentine pavilion was invented 10 years ago, in the year of millennium fever. It was not funded by the national lottery or the Millennium Commission, and sought to deliver no sonorous messages about modern Britain, but it crystallised the feeling that we were in a new century and that, somehow or other, this should be celebrated with new architecture.

Each year, architects were asked to design and construct, in a breathless six-month period, temporary structures outside the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, and had the freedom to try out ideas that the planners would have ground into dust had they been permanent. The gallery's rules were that the pavilions had to be designed by leading architects who had built nothing in Britain, and those at the spectacular, eye-catching end of the profession were favoured. Grabbing the attention of the media was, after all, one of the objectives.

The pavilions were presented as artworks and put up for sale to collectors with the help of the estate agents Knight Frank. They also drew heavily on sponsorship in kind – building materials and skills given free and expertly marshalled by Peter Rogers, of the property developers Stanhope, who is one of the unsung heroes of the pavilion project. The structures were prodigies of the arts of fundraising and PR. They were unveiled to the world with compendious lists of sponsors' names and logos attached. Long rounds of glamorous parties were held to justify the sponsors' investment. The pavilions flourished at the fertile intersection of art, glamour, corporate sponsorship, iconic architecture, PR and property development. They became part of the summer season, like Henley or Cowes with a radical edge.

Inadvertently, they have become excuses for London's failure to achieve comparable levels of design or imagination in the everyday, permanent spaces of the city. The rise of the Serpentine pavilion accompanied a profligate construction boom, yet the list of the pavilion's designers is also a list of architects not invited, with one or two exceptions, to contribute anything else to London. The success of the pavilions allows the city to look more architecture-loving than it actually is. Clearly, this is not the pavilions' fault.

2000: Zaha Hadid



Zaha Hadid's pavilion, 2000.

The first pavilion was created to shelter a fundraising dinner, attended by luminaries including Sting, Steve Martin and the Duke of York, to celebrate the gallery's 30th anniversary. Its aim was to "radically reinvent the accepted idea of a marquee". A folded triangulated structure rose and fell to define different internal spaces and vary the degree of openness. Inside were ranks of angular tables, in shades graded from pale to dark grey.

Hadid was then the world's great unbuilt architect, with few completed buildings but a huge international reputation based on the promise of her extraordinary drawings. The structure was only supposed to last for a week, but the then culture secretary, Chris Smith, liked it so much that he persuaded the planners to let it stand for three months. The pavilion was not one of Hadid's finest works: it was built in a hurry and with difficulty, and it had something of a lashed-together quality. It wasn't as assured as it might have been, but it pioneered an idea – the excitement and interest it aroused got the pavilion concept going.

It was bought by the Royal Shakespeare Company and reassembled in the car park of Stratford's Globe in 2001, after which it was given to a local farmer. One of the angular tables is in my living room: its splayed legs have a habit of tripping people up, which inspires a kind of exasperated affection.

2001: Daniel Liebeskind with Arup

Daniel Liebeskind's pavilion, 2001. Photograph: John Alex Maguire / Rex Features

In 2001 Libeskind was famous for his first major international building, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, finished in 1999 when he was aged 53. He was also still hoping to build the Spiral, an extension to London's Victoria and Albert Museum composed of cascading, ceramic-clad planes, which had somewhat miraculously got planning consent from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The extension eventually foundered on funding issues.

Libeskind's pavilion, called "Eighteen Turns", was created with the engineer Cecil Balmond from Arup who collaborated with Anish Kapoor on the gigantic ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture proposed for the 2012 Olympics. The pavilion was an origami-like composition of aluminium panels that folded up and over each other, creating overlapping spaces: some more intimate, enclosed from the park and the elements.

Greenery reflected in the metal, creating a 3D collage of nature and structure. It was less freighted with significance than other projects of Libeskind's, and also more light-hearted and direct in its appeal. Bought by an anonymous buyer, it re-emerged outside Fota House in Cork, as part of its European City of Culture programme in 2005. Not sighted in public since.

2002: Toyo Ito with Arup

The 2002 pavilion by Toyo Ito with Arup. Photograph: Raf Makda / View Pictures / Rex

Perhaps the most satisfying of Serpentine pavilions, the 2002 building had an intricate and enigmatic steel structure. It was something like a late-Gothic vault gone modern, with an apparently random arrangement of intersecting lines. It had, in fact, an underlying pattern, based on an algorithm of a cube that expanded as it rotated. Panels between the lines were solid, open or glazed, creating the semi-internal, semi-external quality that is common to almost all the pavilions. The building managed to achieve both a powerful presence and, in its white interior, a dazzling brightness. Lime-green chairs by Ross Lovegrove added to its gaiety.

It was designed by Toyo Ito who worked, like Daniel Libeskind, with Cecil Balmond of Arup. Ito had recently completed what is still his most impressive work, a Mediatheque (that is, a library with several kinds of media in it) in the Japanese provincial city of Sendai. Like many pavilion designers, he has not had a sniff of another London project since.

His pavilion, however, has had the most prominent afterlife of any. It was bought by Victor Hwang, then owner of Battersea power station, as a visitor centre for his proposed development there. It is now used for events at his Hôtel Le Beauvallon, overlooking St Tropez in the South of France.

2003: Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer's 2003 pavilion. Photograph: Peter Cook / View Pictures / Rex

The 2003 pavilion came with a great story: the then 95-year-old Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, who worked with Le Corbusier on Rio's prewar ministry of education, and who created the most dazzling landmarks of Brasilia, would make his London debut. It was like getting Carmen Miranda to turn up and do a gig.

The reality wasn't quite as good as the story. Niemeyer did some sketches in Brazil, which were translated into a building, but it lacked the effortless swoop of his best work. Nor did it quite catch the light-on-its-feet spirit of a temporary structure. It was made of steel and concrete, and had a basement, more like a permanent building that happened to have a short lifespan. Faintly saucy drawings, based on Niemeyer's many decades of fascination with the female form, decorated the walls. But it was still better to have a Niemeyer in Britain than not to have one.

The Niemeyer pavilion, along with the Siza, Koolhaas and Eliasson structures, was bought by a single anonymous buyer for a "considerable sum … many millions", and all four are in storage. The buyer intends that they will one day be seen again in public. He says he does not want them to become "private follies".

2004: MVRDV

The Dutch team MVRDV's proposal for the 2004 pavilion, which was never made.

In about 2002 the Serpentine's director asked me for my thoughts as to who might design future pavilions. MVRDV, I said. Who are they? she asked. Rising stars of Dutch architecture, I said. We need someone more established, she said. How about Alvaro Siza? I replied. I therefore felt a modest pride when both MVRDV and Siza were successively chosen to design pavilions. MVRDV's, however, was the one that never happened. It was invented at the peak of the great noughties concept boom, when nothing seemed too impossible or outrageous, and the idea was to bury the entire Serpentine Gallery beneath an artificial mountain, up which the public would be able to promenade.

It was an inspired departure from the idea of a more-or-less-pretty object standing on a lawn, but it was extremely challenging in terms of issues such as budget, difficulty of construction, and disabled access. As a result, there was no pavilion in 2004. The Serpentine still hoped to build it in subsequent years but eventually gave up the attempt. Like the gigantic tower that Gordon Selfridge wanted to build on his Oxford Street store, it has joined the ghostly legions of London's great unbuilt.

2005: Alvaro Siza/Eduardo Souto de Moura with Arup



Pavilion 2005, by Portuguese architects Alvaro Siza & Eduardo Souto De Moura with Arup. Photograph: James Brittain / View Pictures /

Alvaro Siza, and his ex-pupil Eduardo Souto de Moura, are two Portuguese architects noted for a certain simplicity and lightness of touch. They typically work with plain walls of stone or white plaster, and rely on subtleties of light, space and material. Siza, now in his late 70s, is venerated for his patient, consistent, unflashy work.

Generally the Serpentine Pavilion favours spectacular more than subtle architects, as the 2005 edition confirmed. Siza and de Moura designed a low, humped roof of interlocking laminated timber that "created a dialogue" with the gallery's permanent building.

The roof turned into sloping walls, which stopped a few feet off the ground, like a big skirt. This created a cut-off view of the surroundings from inside the pavilion. It offered a few quietly rewarding moments, but it didn't zing. That it looked like a tortoise didn't help.

2006: Rem Koolhaas with Arup

Rem Koolhaas' Dome pavilion, 2006. Photograph: Alisdair Macdonald / Rex Feature

Rem Koolhaas, always suspicious of architecture for its own sake, intimated scepticism about the pavilion concept, but with his collaborators came up with an instantly appealing monument. His big idea was to create a gas-filled balloon, or "cosmic egg", that would hover above an "amphitheatre". The balloon echoed the inflatable structures beloved of radical 1960s architects. It was designed to rise in good weather, opening up the amphitheatre to fresh air and views of the sky, and descend again to keep out rain.

It proved a cumbersome way to manage the environment, although there was something hallucinatory about the appearance of this luminous orb, like a grounded moon, in the park. The balloon was more a sign of spontaneity than the reality. But more than any other pavilion, it became a place of public exchange thanks to the events devised by Koolhaas and Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. The most memorable were the 24-hour interview marathons, in which, for example, you could hear Gilbert and George discourse at 6am. Koolhaas's practice OMA has had more success in London than most pavilion designers. Its Rothschild Bank HQ is going up in the City, and he masterplanned the proposed conversion of the Commonwealth Institute to rehouse the Design Museum.

2007: Olafur Eliasson/Kjetil Thorsen

In 2007 the pavilion was designe by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen. Photograph: Luke Hayes / View Pictures / Rex

The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson was billed as the lead designer of the 2007 pavilion, assisted by Kjetil Thorsen, of the Norwegian architects Snøhetta. This didn't quite hit the right note, as the whole point of the pavilion until then had been that it was the work of architects in the grounds of an art gallery.

It also didn't help that Eliasson had created a smash hit in London's other series of high-impact temporary structures, the Unilever commissions at Tate Modern. His Weather Project of 2003, with its artificial sun and reflecting ceiling, had thousands lying on the ground as if in a hippy sci-fi movie.

Eliasson's Serpentine pavilion was tamer. It was a timber-clad spiral that allowed you to go to the top, look at the view, and go down again, while experiencing some quite nice bits of design on the way. The Snøhetta/Eliasson collaboration produced the much more powerful National Opera House in Oslo – the roof of which acts as an artificial hillside in the middle of the city. Their Serpentine pavilion was perfectly nice, but one of the least memorable in the series.

2008: Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry's pavilion, 2008. Photograph: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Düsseldorf, Prague, Dundee and Bilbao all have permanent buildings by Frank Gehry but somehow London, with its prodigious appetite for construction never got round to it. As he is now past 80, the 2008 Serpentine Pavilion is likely to be the great Canadian-born Californian's first and last appearance in the capital.

The commission gave him the chance to return to the direct style of his earlier career, before the Bilbao Guggenheim made him into a specialist of elaborately curving glossiness. He also saw it as a chance to give experience to younger people in his office, including his son Samuel. Made of chunky pieces of timber, it comprised a "street" running axially towards the gallery, sheltered by flying planes of wood and glass. Banks of seats on either side also gave it the quality of an amphitheatre.

"It had to be wood – I'm Canadian, right?" was how Gehry described it. "And then we were thinking of those old catapults. This is Britain, and the Romans invaded you. I came up with the idea of a four-poster structure with a big pillar in each corner and it looked OK, but it needed to be a little more festive. Then Sam made a model with butterflies flying through it, and that turned into the glass roof."

Like most of the pavilions it was sold to a private and anonymous buyer.

2009: Sanaa

Last year's pavilion, designed by Japanese architects Sanaa. Photograph: Arcaid / Rex Features

By 2009, it began to feel as if the Serpentine Pavilion idea might be running out of puff, but the Japanese architects Sanaa came up with one of the most delightful, as well as the most delicate yet. Sanaa's two protagonists, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, designed a thin, freeform aluminium roof which, as they put it, drifted "like smoke" between the trees. It had no walls, but was supported on skinny poles. It reflected sky and grass and when it rained its mirrored soffit made it look as if rain was falling upwards. It "expanded park and sky," as they also put it, and "melted into its surroundings".

Architects talk like this quite often but on this occasion the building did what they said.

The Serpentine Pavilion has always had a close relationship with the Pritzker prize, the award that is the Nobel Prize for architecture in all but name. Eight pavilion designers have the prize, including the architect of the forthcoming 2010 pavilion, Jean Nouvel. This year Sejima and Nishizawa joined the Pritzker gang. The private buyer of the pavilion, again, remains anonymous.

2010: Jean Nouvel (pictured top)

The 2010 pavilion will be in a vivid red, intended to contrast with the green of the park, and evoke London buses, post boxes and phone boxes. It will also, according to the Serpentine, be "a contrast of lightweight materials and dramatic, metal, cantilevered structures". It will have "bold geometric forms, large retractable awnings" and a 12m-high, sloping wall rising above the lawn. Table tennis will be added to the pavilion's usual programme of talks and cafe and there will be a "Marathon of Maps for the 21st Century", in which "artists, writers, thinkers and scientists will present maps encompassing their experience of the world today".

The architect is the Parisian Jean Nouvel, who first came to widespread fame with his Institut du Monde Arabe in 1987. There, he charmed people with a wall of steel shutters, inspired by the traditional perforated screens of Cairo, that opened and closed like the aperture of a camera. Generally, his work combines a sensuousness of surface, a touch of showmanship and outbreaks of harshness. He has no house style, using different techniques on different projects. His work includes the forbidding, black law courts in Nantes and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where layers of glass generate a field of reflections. He designed a luxury hotel in Bordeaux wrapped in rusty metal screens and the Torre Agbar in Barcelona. The latter is like London's Gherkin in form, but has a more intriguing wrapping of layered and coloured glass. Like the Gherkin, it is more interesting for its effect on the skyline than for the abrupt way it descends on the streets. Nouvel is now working on an outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, where he has designed a huge, shallow dome like an inverted saucer that is perforated to create dappled patterns of light.