Go straight to the main content



murmurART

art advisory - looking for something specific or help in finding work by early career artists. contact info@murmurart.com
Review Jul 15 2009 « | »
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 This year's Hyde Park talking point is designed for open metaphorical association, but also shelters you from the...

Harry Williams

The Serpentine's Summer Pavilion was unveiled last Saturday, and it performed the most basic task of British park architecture: to provide shelter from the rain.

As the light July drizzle descended, people gathered under the floating aluminium roof held up by a series of thin steel poles and watched the rain drip from its edges. There is a wonderful merging of outside and inside, however, as there are no walls here, only a few curved Perspex screens which hug one of the protuberances of this amoeba-shaped "floating cloud".

This year's pavilion is designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa who run an architectural practice in Tokyo called SANAA (their surnames put together). They have already completed feted projects in Tokyo and New York and, like all the Serpentine Pavilion architects stretching back to Zaha Hadid in 2000, they have not yet built anything in the UK.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of their pavilion is the mirrored underside of the construction, which saw the well-dressed groups of invitees on Saturday chatting upside down. Look up, and you can see your face amongst a thicket of heads.

Seen from above, the pavilion looks a vial of mercury spilt on the ground, but its supporting poles are of different lengths; high enough at one point to provide sweeping views south across Hyde Park, and low enough at another for a child to clamber on to the roof. In fact, a child did clamber on to the wet roof on Saturday and was quickly called down by a burly, umbrella-wielding bouncer.

For all its lightness and smoky immateriality - which I'm sure will be enhanced on a fine summers day - there is something deeply pleasurable about this roll of aluminium which, like one of the Jeff Koons 'inflatables' currently on show in the Serpentine itself, just makes you want to touch.

Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist gave a tag team presentation, and talked about the pavilion working as a 'town-square'. There are a whole series of events lined up to take place under the new awning, culminating in a 'Poetry Marathon' in October. While the pavilion may see congregations of important people, it works as the architectural opposite of a town-square: an unenclosed space which both reflects and frames the trees and slopes of Hyde Park, and the shimmer and shape of the Serpentine Lake.

Agnieszka Gratza

That Britain has its own Cloud Appreciation Society advocating the therapeutic merits of cloudspotting should come as no surprise. I wonder what its members would make of the latest addition to the architectural beauty pageant erected every summer since 2000 on the grounds of the Serpentine Gallery? Clouds are gathering ominously as I seek shelter beneath the reflective canopy of the Pavilion designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese architecture practice SANAA.

You could debate about the shape of this slip of a building, as if purposely designed to make us indulge in flights of poetic fancy. Made of twin mirror-finished aluminium plates, supported by slender stainless steel columns, the roof is what captures most people's imaginations.

It evokes a reflective cloud or a pool of water for some, a leaf or smoke floating above the park for others - judging by the promotional literature. Its contours made me think of a puzzle piece, one endowed with a chameleon-like ability to blend in with the natural surroundings, soaking up the park's greenery as well as the sky's changing moods.

Japanese influences are at work in the choice of materials and in the scant ornamental details. Neatly laid out here and there round the Pavilion's edges, white gravel planted with trees and shrubs calls to mind Zen gardens.

Except that little meditation is going on around me as I linger inside the auditorium. The light grey concrete floor, smooth as soapstone, already displays traces of unruly activity. Bits of gravel are being swept off it and someone is mopping the floor beside me: the Pavilion's café appears to be running a brisk trade. A few hours from its official opening, children are busy playing on the grassy slopes outside the Pavilion, couples are picnicking under one of its low-lying flaps, a group of ladies are having their tea perched on the funky chairs in the auditorium space. Londoners have made the place their own.

In vaunting the Pavilion's uncanny way of absorbing and mirroring its surroundings, the rapturous descriptions have apparently not factored in its future users. The flip side of the reflective roof is that it intensifies the impression of crowdedness. For all the talk of openness and transparency, a structure of modest proportions designed to accommodate up to three hundred people standing, will inevitably feel packed like a can of sardines at times.

The Serpentine Gallery Pavillion is up from 12th July - 18th August. More information and ad nauseam sponsor listings are on the Serpentine Gallery website.

    Comments

Add Comments

  • CAPTCHA Image