If you happen to be in Kensington Gardens during cocktail hour between now and the start of October, the sound of chinking glasses and tinkling laughter will be inescapable, marking the unfolding of the annual corporate fête d’été that is the Serpentine Pavilion. This year’s revels will go on without Yana Peel, who resigned as chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries last week following allegations about her financial interests in a controversial Israeli cybersecurity company. With the gloss coming off a fixture of London’s social circuit, it’s tempting to see this year’s pavilion, an ominous stone cloud by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, as an apt metaphor for the noxious conflation of contemporary art and big business.
Peel was the successor to Julia Peyton-Jones, originator of the Serpentine Pavilion programme. Inaugurated in 2000 with a design by Zaha Hadid, it alights on architects who have not yet built in the UK and gives them the chance to produce an experimental parkland folly. It’s a kind of five-finger exercise or architectural amuse-bouche, but nearly 20 years on, the landscape has palpably shifted. There’s a growing sense that the notion of architecture as art object has become a bloated irrelevance, despite the Serpentine Gallery putting its pavilion vigorously to work as a space for performance and encounter.
Historically the purview of royal or aristocratic patrons with deep pockets and an eye for self-promotion, the architectural cult of the pavilion has a gilded lineage, from the Field of the Cloth of Gold to the Serpentine’s more ascetic incarnations. Etymologically, “pavilion” has its root in the French papillon (butterfly), alluding to a winged form, but also connoting a gaudy, ephemeral entity. Over the years the Serpentine has cast its net widely, snaring all sorts of eccentric specimens, from Chinese controversialist Ai Weiwei to Swiss magus Peter Zumthor. This year it’s the turn of Ishigami, an architect known for his love of hyper-abstraction and the insistent pushing of materials and fabrication to extremes. An intimation of things to come was an early project for an implausible table constructed from a single piece of steel four millimetres thick and 10 metres long, designed without any intervening supports.
Ishigami’s initial drawings for his pavilion depicted a cluster of some indeterminate substance hovering leadenly in a rain-sodden park. On paper, it felt very Health Goth: edgy and brooding, yet simultaneously refined and precise. In the flesh it turns out to be an undulating humpback roof of thick, dark fragments of Cumbrian slate supported by a network of toothpick-slim columns. The scaly stone carapace has a distinctly reptilian quality, like a junior Godzilla rearing up from the depths. Stone roofs are a feature of traditional Japanese architecture and the idea of subverting them into a petrified spoil heap clearly appealed to Ishigami.
His work is characterised by an apparent feyness and delicacy, undercut by a steely and slightly terrifying rigour. The idea of a solid cloud or “levitating cluster of scattered rocks billowing like a piece of fabric”, as Ishigami describes it, is typically antithetical. A previous project for a workshop at Japan’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology was designed to resemble a birch forest, with 305 columns arranged apparently at random to convey a sense of arboreal intensity. It took two years to work out where each column should go.
In all Ishigami’s buildings, effortful things are made to appear effortless. Here, individual pieces of slate, each cut by hand, are painstakingly attached by wire loops to a steel matrix. The overall weight of the roof contrives to anchor and stabilise the composition. A critical aspect of the design was how intimately the pavilion merged with the surrounding landscape, seamlessly conjoining nature and artifice, but this has been rather scuppered by the presence of polycarbonate barriers to tactfully steer visitors around. Inside, it’s cool and gloomy, like a crepuscular wedding marquee. You half expect a drunk uncle to heave into view and start telling you his life story.
With a penchant for “impossible objects” and obtuse theorising, Ishigami is hard to pin down. And there’s a slightly murky underside to all the cutting-edge cleverness and boundary pushing. Earlier this year Ishigami was outed for the deeply questionable employment practice of unpaid internships. Though now illegal in the UK, unpaid “open desk” internships and 13-hour working days are still common in Japanese architects’ offices. Mindful of a potential PR disaster (before the actual disaster of the Peel affair), the Serpentine moved to seek reassurances that anyone working on the pavilion project would be properly salaried.
Until recently, the Serpentine has had the summer spotlight all to itself. But other, more agile initiatives are now challenging its supremacy. London’s Architecture Foundation (AF) stages an annual design competition for an Antepavilion, giving emerging artists, architects and makers the opportunity to create a new work in an urban environment. Staged on a rooftop overlooking a canal in Haggerston in east London, it occupies a locale far removed from the manicured confines of Kensington Gardens and was conceived as a conscious riposte to the Serpentine with its preening self-regard and Faustian pacts of corporate sponsorship.
Whittled down from 200 entries, this year’s winning Antepavilion proposal is by Maich Swift Architects for its Potemkin Theatre, its comically rackety form inspired by Monsieur Hulot’s tumbledown building in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle. Resembling an architectural battenberg cake, the canalside frontage is a timber grid clad in panels of painted canvas. Behind this structure, open galleries overlook the rooftop and surroundings, providing a stage from which to see and be seen. Currently under construction, it will function as a theatre, cinema and events space over the summer. “Provision of affordable arts and performance space serves to maintain a presence in a city where increasing rents threaten London’s status as a place for creation,” says AF director Ellis Woodman.
Meanwhile, down in south London’s verdant hinterland, the Dulwich Pavilion has been unveiled as part of the London festival of architecture. Set in the grounds of John Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Colour Palace is a searing, blaring kaleidoscope of exultant chromophilia. Designed by architects Pricegore working with Yinka Ilori, a young designer of British-Nigerian heritage, its colours and patterns riff on the exuberance of Nigerian textiles and Lagos street markets, but its precisely cuboid form also alludes to the geometry of Soane’s 19th-century gallery spaces.
Rows of thin timber battens painted in different hues combine to create a pixelated, optically dazzling surface that shimmers like shot silk or a Bridget Riley painting. Chubby red legs support the structure and a pink minstrel’s gallery runs around its interior. Like the Serpentine Pavilion, it’s essentially a temporary armature for activities with a bar tucked in a corner, but unlike the Serpentine, its combination of generous proportions and uninhibited ornament are genuinely intoxicating and uplifting. Roll on summer.
