‘Like an expanding crepe-paper ornament': Serpentine unveils its first movable pavilion

The Guardian

4 days ago

Past pavilions have taken the form of inflatable balloons, teetering plastic pyramids and cork-lined lairs dug into the ground. We have seen a fibreglass cocoon perched on boulders, a wildflower garden enclosed by tar-daubed walls, and an assortment of undulating canopies, clad in polished steel and jagged slate. Now, to celebrate 25 years of building experimental structures on its front lawn, London's Serpentine gallery has unveiled its first pavilion that moves.
'Every time you think of an idea for the project,' says Marina Tabassum, the Bangladeshi architect behind this year's kinetic enclosure, 'you realise, 'Oh, that's already been done.'' This is the eternal dilemma for any designer selected for this prestigious annual commission: how to concoct a novel structure on a tight deadline that will enrapture park-goers, entertain corporate sponsors, and appeal to collectors, who are ultimately expected to acquire the thing – as well as, most importantly, provide a shelter for an overpriced coffee.
To the Serpentine's quarter century of domed, cylindrical and cocoon-shaped cafes, Tabassum has now added a pill-shaped pavilion. 'A capsule in time' is how she describes her 55-metre long structure, formed of timber arches 28m high, clad in translucent brown panels, sliced open in places for entrances and views of a single gingko tree, poetically planted in line with the gallery's roof tower. The vaulted enclosure terminates in a momentous domed apse at either end, recalling tropical glasshouses and church naves, while the zigzag cladding gives it the look of an expanding crepe-paper ornament, is if it might fold itself away at any moment.
None of these things were on Tabassum's mind. Instead, she cites shamiana, the ceremonial tents erected for festive gatherings in south Asia. Their 'beautiful quality of filtered light' is what she was keen to bring here. She had originally hoped to clad her structure with coarse lengths of jute, but a combination of fire safety regulations and British rain put paid to the sackcloth. It's a shame the fabric was ditched. The tinted brown plastic, fixed to a chunky steel frame between the big brown arches, calls less to mind a festive tent than the vaulted atrium of a 1970s office block – a chic one, nonetheless.
The plastic does the job, though, keeping the rain out and filtering light through the variously tinted panels, but it has a corporate slickness at odds with Tabassum's work in Bangladesh. Her buildings there revel in their rough brickwork, raw concrete, and use of slender bamboo – and their ability to do a lot with minimal means. She has built emergency homes for the delta-dwellers of the Ganges that are essays in lightweight, modular elegance, using woven grass and bamboo. This five-month summer canopy feels hugely over-engineered and carbon intensive in comparison.
It is a common curse of the annual commission, which often sees architects' ideas lost in translation by the Serpentine's speed and prefabrication-oriented engineers and builders, Aecom and Stage One. Plans for earth bricks result in blocks of wood; ideas for transparent panels bring sheets of CNC-milled plywood; dreams of handmade clay domes end up as prefab wooden cylinders. Any hope for true material experimentation is ultimately lost, which seems to undermine a central point of the commission.
The dissonance this year is no more evident than in the kinetic gadgetry. As we speak, a 10-tonne chunk of Tabassum's capsule begins to move, at imperceptible speed, closing one of the gaps. 'I wanted to keep the sense of openness to the park,' she says. 'So it was very important to keep these cuts in the structure. But the brief also requires a covered space for 200 people, for events, so we had to be able to close it up.' She says the solution – an underground hydraulic machine – was one of the most expensive parts of the project, and it seems like a herculean effort to move the canopy just 1.4 metres. You might struggle to spot the difference, before and after the great manoeuvre.
The surprisingly substantial nature of the pavilions is partly down to the fact that they are intended to live on, in the parks and gardens of their millionaire collectors. No future for Tabassum's capsule has yet been announced, but she has an idea in mind. 'If my wishes are of any value, I would like it to become a library,' she says. Hinting at its afterlife, she has equipped the space with shelves, and a selection of books that celebrate the richness of Bengali culture, literature and poetry, and the ecology of Bangladesh.
In the meantime, she wants it to be a place for dialogue. 'This has been a year marked by intolerance, wars, countless deaths, protests and suppressions,' she says. 'I would like this to be a space where people can come together, forget their differences and just talk about humanity.' Could this be the first protest pavilion?
It is a suitably calm space for taking the heat out of discussions, and the apses should provide great natural acoustics for lectures and events. But the sense of tranquility is thrown into sharp relief by what stands next door.
Like a brash uncle in a loud comedy shirt muscling his way into the wedding photos, a second pavilion has been built just a few metres away, across the entrance path, doing its best to upstage Tabassum's restrained enclosure. It is the work of 88-year-old Sir Peter Cook, a co-founder of the radical 1960s group Archigram, former head of UCL's Bartlett school of architecture – and more recently consultant on desert fantasies for Saudi Arabia's regime.
In an astonishingly ill-judged moved, the Serpentine has commissioned Cook to conjure a 'play pavilion' for its 25th anniversary, suggesting the work of a woman from the global south is not quite enough on its own. Looking like a crumpled cheeseburger, with a domed bun-like canopy hovering above a fluorescent orange cylinder, clad with what look like globular smears of ketchup and mustard, Cook's structure is a clumsy eyeful. It is 'the fool, the joker, the mischievous child,' he claims in an accompanying text, a reminder that 'we should never take ourselves too seriously.' One might have hoped for a bit more seriousness than this drunken napkin sketch.
Sponsored by Lego, it contains a lumpen series of plastic brick towers, while a yellow plastic slide is bolted on to the side, as an invitation to 'become part of this jolly thing'. In its dad-dancing desperation to be fun, the sorry structure merely serves as a reminder that the park's nearby playgrounds are a good deal more inventive and playful than this washed-up sponsorship opportunity. Numerous other young architects could have conjured a more inventive play space, should the gallery have taken the idea seriously.
Why choose Cook? Maybe they held a seance. The Serpentine cites the posthumous wishes of its first pavilion architect, Zaha Hadid, as the reason. Bettina Korek, chief executive, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director, said in a statement: 'Zaha Hadid long envisioned a collaboration between Serpentine and Peter Cook, whose radical design philosophy perfectly aligns with her belief that 'there should be no end to experimentation'. Now, that vision is becoming a reality.'
But perhaps Cook's squashed Lego burger makes a fitting final bookend to this 25-year jamboree of pavilions, a tradition that seems to have had its day. It could follow in the footsteps of Zaha's angular marquee, which unexpectedly ended up in Flambards theme park in Cornwall, where it enjoyed a second life hosting children's birthday parties, until the place was shuttered last year. We can look forward to Cook's structure being unearthed in a McDonald's car park in years to come, the jaunty legacy of Archigram adorned with discarded Happy Meals.
Marina Tabassum's Serpentine Pavilion is open from 6 June until 26 October; Peter Cook's play pavilion is open from 11 June until 10 August