“There’s a disease out there,” American artist Dan Graham observed last year. “Artists want to become architects, and architects want to become artists – which I think I may have started.” Whether he is to blame or not, it is clear that this summer has seen an outbreak of public artworks, pavilions and other “psycho-buildings” in tired seaside towns, country estates and galleries’ front gardens. So it makes sense that curator Emma Underhill and the organisers of Portavilion, a “portable art project”, decided to commission Graham, an early pioneer of art outside the “white cube” of the gallery-space and a maker of pavilions since the 1970s, to make the first of four portable, temporary artworks to be placed in London parks this month and next. The series also includes works by Toby Paterson, Monika Sosnowska and Annika Eriksson, whose miniature cinema has just opened in Regent’s Park.

Graham famously dislikes “architects who secretly want to be artists” (he cites Frank Gehry, the architect who has designed the “artist’s pavilion” outside the Serpentine this year), but his own pavilions defy categorisation. Made of three squares of double-sided mirror, one of which contains a large circular opening, and resembling a futuristic garden shed, Graham’s commissioned work in Hyde Park, “Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cut-out Variation H” (pictured right), invites you to clamber inside it to examine the park, your own reflection and the reflection of other spectators through half-reflective, half-transparent glass.