Morning:
13°c
Your first thought as you approach this year's Serpentine Pavilion is “where is it?” Last year Frank Gehry erected thumping chunks of timber, and before him Rem Koolhaas put up an inflated Zeppelin. All you see now are some skinny poles and an inch-thick sheet of aluminium.
This is intentional. The architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are “anti-monumental”. They don't believe in sticking lumps of stuff in your face.
They don't even call this structure a building, but a “field”, and that is what it feels like. It is something you wander in, its boundaries imprecise. The reflective, curvy roof is also something like a lake, inverted and above your head, a surreal version of the nearby Serpentine. Or it could be big silvery leaf, arrested in mid-fall.
Above all it is a device for enhancing the beauty of the park. The reflections on the ceiling invert and amplify the lush greenery. “Rain,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery, “has never looked so beautiful” as when it runs off the edge of the pavilion roof, and seems to fall upwards in the reflective ceiling.
The roof offers shade and shelter from the rain and sunshine when you want it. Like Sejima herself, it is slight and stylish, and stands lightly on the ground. The only quibble is that the detail is not quite as crisp as it might be: some elements are not as straight, vertical or parallel as they are meant to be.
The Serpentine Pavilion is now a fixture of the summer Season, with Ascot and Henley and Cowes. It has proved, against the odds, recession-proof, with the sponsor NetJets stumping up the funds to make it happen.
There have been some years when the Pavilion seemed to be running out of steam, when there seemed to be a limit to how many variations famous architects could extract from the idea. The Sanaa pavilion is a return to form, and brings the idea back to life.
