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Frank Gehry's first building in England is in many ways inspired by the country's summers: It is designed to be as fleeting as London sunshine in July.

The architect, born in Toronto 79 years ago, has just unveiled his temporary pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, the latest in the gallery's eight-year series of short-lived buildings designed by high-profile architects.

Gehry has claimed many influences for the wood, steel and glass structure: Leonardo da Vinci's catapult drawings, butterflies, the striped beach huts and park chairs of English summer, and something closer to his birthplace: "We've been playing with big pieces of wood," he told London's Evening Standard newspaper. "It had to be wood - I'm Canadian, right?"

On a recent, rare sunny day, the pavilion was a hit with families and lunchtime office refugees. It doesn't look like a typical Gehry building - jagged planes of glass and jutting steel beams replace the familiar curves of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles - but its Douglas fir pillars and frame make sense in Hyde Park's greenery.

In each of the past eight years, the Serpentine has commissioned a celebrated artist or architect to build a summer pavilion. Several of them, such as Olafur Eliasson's slanting, open-topped cone, and Rem Koolhaas's bubble, which expanded and contracted with the weather, have been bought by an anonymous patron.

The fleeting nature of the projects and the fact that there are only six months between conception and completion are catnip to architects, says the Serpentine's Hans Ulrich Obrist. "Things can be planned to death, and by the time you see something happen, the desire is gone," says the gallery's co-director. "Here, the architects get to do something they might not with a permanent building. It's much more playful."

This is not Gehry's only ephemeral commission; his Los Angeles-based firm is also designing a series of "pop-up" (aka temporary) stores for Project Red, rock star Bono's African charity.

He also designed the new addition to Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario in his home town.

For his pavilion, Gehry said he started with the inspiration of medieval catapults, and then his son and fellow architect Sam came up with the idea of butterflies, which became the roof's slanting glass panels. The stripes etched onto the glass are meant to resemble beach huts or the chairs in nearby St. James's Park.

An even closer influence just at the edge of Hyde Park is Speaker's Corner, the legendary gathering-place for ranters and demagogues. In October, Gehry's pavilion will be the site of the Marathon Manifesto, to which 50 artists and architects have been invited to lay out their visions for the 21st century over a 24-hour period.

The pavilion is the first building that Gehry has completed in England. "I've heard people say they love my work, but not here," he told reporters. There's a Gehry-designed cancer hospice in Dundee, Scotland, but an ambitious project for the seaside town of Hove in southern England was derailed in the planning stages.

"He shrugs his shoulders when he's asked why," says the Serpentine's director, Julia Peyton-Jones, who approached the architect with the pavilion plan in November. "But it's a very serious omission."