Posts Tagged Serpentine pavilion
The new Serpentine pavilion is a rhapsody in red
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 7, 2010
Award-winning architect Jean Nouvel has finally built in Britain. He tells Jonathan Glancey why he created a 'sun machine' in a London park (complete with ping-pong tables)
Jean Nouvel stands before his first British building, a striking all-red structure set amid the sun-baked greenery of Kensington Gardens in London, and says: "You walk past the park. You look. You catch the red between the trees. What is it? Sails? A circus? Something. You don't know what, so you have to look."
The French architect is talking about the summer pavilion he has created for the Serpentine Gallery, which was unveiled yesterday. What inspired this rhapsody in red? "It was that moment," he says, "when the summer sun catches you full in the eyes and, as you blink, the world dissolves into red."
Nouvel's pavilion – the 10th to grace this park – isn't just red on the outside, though. Beneath its commanding red steel frame and retractable red canvas awnings, there's a red rubber floor, around which are dotted red table tennis tables, red hammocks, red tables and chairs, and red chess sets. Even the auditorium and cafe bar are red (as are its fridges). And, just in case you had any difficulty spotting the pavilion from a distance, off to the side there is a 12-metre red glass wall, sprouting up from the grass like a great big punctuation mark.
This "big sunglass", as Nouvel calls it, leans over at an unsettling angle, appearing to threaten the pavilion, adding a sense of drama, even danger, to his eye-catching creation. "In one way," says Nouvel, "the pavilion is a sun machine, a way of directing sunlight. In another, it is a fragile flower that rises in the park in the summer sun, wilts in the autumn, and then vanishes. Of course, red is also the colour of London in some ways – the buses, the pillar boxes, the soldiers for the Queen – but mostly red is about the sun."
But Nouvel, who follows in the footsteps of previous Serpentine architects Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Rem Koolhaas, wants the pavilion to do more than just catch the sun. "I want it to catch and filter emotions, to be a little place of warmth and delight. For an architect, it's always a pleasure to work with a programme that has no great consequences – the pavilion comes, the pavilion goes. It leaves an impression, echoes of emotion, nothing more. In this way, the architect is free to be the artist. This is not a perfect exercise in architecture. It's a building from a dream that allows us to have some little, I hope happy, sensations. It's architecture on holiday."
Nouvel's pavilion is a simple yet striking construction that, on closer inspection, proves to be far more than a brightly coloured sculpture. Some of its red surfaces absorb light, others reflect it; some glimmer, others are translucent. Beneath its retractable roofs hang photographs of another grand park in a great capital city: Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg – but that's a formal park, like most of France's, unlike the more relaxed and playful English ones. These shots are by Jean Baudrillard, the celebrated French philosopher who died three years ago; he was a big influence on Nouvel, as well as a friend. Through this pavilion, architect and philosopher walk together again in a vibrant green space.
The structure has clearly been shaped, with a little help from Arup engineers led by David Glover and Cecil Balmond, as a plaything. Yes, there will be serious talks and various events in the auditorium. But before people go along to these, they can meet and chat in the red bar – or play red table-tennis, or kick a red football or hurl a red Frisbee out into the park. So, what's with all this playfulness?
Well, the Serpentine pavilion is traditionally designed by an architect who has yet to build, or complete, a building in Britain. The 2010 pavilion, however, is only just ahead of the game: this autumn sees the opening of Nouvel's One New Change, a controversial shopping and office complex to the east of St Paul's Cathedral. This is serious architecture, about as playful as a nuclear reactor. Nouvel himself has described the building as a "stealth bomber": although enormous, it is clad in non-reflective (or opaque) glass, as if to disguise its bulk. Prince Charles tried to scupper Nouvel's chances here, but failed to get his own preferred architects appointed. The pavilion, in toying with architecture, provides a bit of balance against what is to come.
It seems a shame that Nouvel's first major permanent work in Britain is a commercial behemoth. His strength lies in the design of art galleries, concert halls and museums. The energetic 64-year- old's best works are the Institut du Monde Arabe, a mesmerising cultural foundation by the Seine in Paris, completed in 1987; 1994's Fondation Cartier, a quietly beautiful Parisian arts centre that reveals itself through layers of huge glass screens; and last year's Copenhagen Concert Hall, a mesh cube lit up at night to dazzling effect. Each of these finely wrought and enigmatic buildings was expressed in one overriding colour: silver, white, blue.
"Architecture is a dialogue," says Nouvel. "When it's complete, I hope you will see some of the ways we've incorporated games into One New Change. There will be a terrace with new views of the City and St Paul's – and it won't have that transparent glass look you get with 99% of city buildings, which makes everywhere seem nowhere." Is it possible to take ideas from art galleries and pavilions and use them in big commercial buildings? "If it's desirable, then it's possible. Architects have to offer a window into the future, even when the window won't open."
Nouvel's best commercial designs have been the soaring, 38-storey Torre Agbar in Barcelona, a Catalan cousin of Norman Foster's Gherkin (completed in the same year the Gherkin opened, 2004, but with a mosaic effect rather than a diamond one); his (sadly unbuilt) Tour Sans Fins proposal, an ethereal, pencil-thin 1,300ft skyscraper that would have vanished into the skies above Paris's La Défense office complex; and the Hotel in Lucerne, opened a decade ago and showing again Nouvel's obsession with immersing users of his buildings in intense colour, this time black.
I once stayed at the Hotel: it was like being Jean Nouvel for a few days, such was the insight it gave into his style, which began to feel like a philosophy. My suite – pitch black at one end, pure white at the other, where it opened into an unexpected bamboo garden – was reached along a jet-black corridor that rendered day and night indistinguishable. The topsy-turvy atmosphere was heightened by a concealed projector throwing a scene from Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire across the bedroom ceiling. The same scene played over and over and I couldn't turn it off. It was dreamlike, unforgettable and, to be honest, somewhat maddening.
Nouvel is very good when working with art, artists and imaginative concepts. Both of his major arts projects are now in the Middle East: the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the National Museum of Qatar. Both are caravanserai-like attempts to find a design that responds to the desert landscape, and both are set above water gardens. "These seem to be early days for European architects working in the Middle East," he says. "We have to do better than we have before. We must find ways of helping to shape a true Arabian architecture, not just put ready-made, inappropriate designs down in the desert."
Nouvel is an architect with plenty of jokers up the sleeves of his trademark jet-black suits. But his ideas can be as romantic as they are philosophical: the Tour Sans Fins proposals showed how even the most matter-of-fact building type (in this case the office block) could be a work of poetic imagination, finesse and structural daring. As the sun beats down on his scarlet pavilion, it is hard not to think of Nouvel as an optimist, too, one with a very unFrench view of the British weather. He has certainly been lucky to unveil his "sun machine" in the middle of a heatwave. He could so easily have found himself explaining its inspiration from beneath a rain-battered red umbrella, as the world dissolved into grey.
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion is open to the public from 10 July until 17 October.
Jean Nouvel’s Serpentine gallery pavilion
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 6, 2010
The French architect Jean Nouvel's Serpentine gallery pavilion was unveiled this morning. Here's a first look around the temporary structure
Jean Nouvel, the French revolutionary architect
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 3, 2010
The designer of this year's Serpentine pavilion is also hard at work on another of his radical buildings, right next to St Paul's
If you want to know the difference between Britain and France, you could do worse than study the pronouncements that Jean Nouvel and his office make about their work. "This is not a tower," they say of something that definitely is a tower. "It is more an emergence." Or, of a museum project: "Everything is designed to evoke an emotional response to the primary object, to protect it from light, but also to capture that rare ray of light indispensable to make it vibrate and awaken its spirituality."
Over here, this would be professional suicide. Project managers would reckon that such fancy talk must add at least 30% to the budget. Baffled clients would pass on to someone who didn't make them feel stupid. In France, such utterances, delivered by the black-clad and – but for his beetling eyebrows – hairless Nouvel are part of his success. It may be a cliche, but the French really do like an intellectual show; we mistrust it.
We tolerate it in foreigners, however, enough for Nouvel to be the architect of this year's Serpentine pavilion, which will be unveiled this week. He has also designed One New Change, a shopping and office building now being built to the east of St Paul's cathedral, a brooding, rock-like thing that Prince Charles tried to stop with one of his secret letters. (As a member of the competition jury which selected Nouvel for this job, I recall a more direct, less Rive Gauche approach when he presented. He was canny enough to know this would play better with this Anglo-Saxon audience.)
Nouvel's biggest idea is what he calls "dematerialisation", the "interplay of light and materiality", which "gives the impression that materials have vanished". He talks of "fragile effects", "fleeting moments" and "precise mists" in his work. In the Fondation Cartier in Paris, multiple planes of glass cause the facade to dissolve into reflections and transparencies. At One New Change, he has chosen a kind of glazing with a matt and grainy surface, which is intended to be stone-like while still also glassy.
Now aged 64, he originally wanted to be an artist, but was persuaded by his parents to enter the solider profession of architecture. He worked for Claude Parent, an intellectually driven architect famous for his collaborations with artists such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, and the philosopher Paul Virilio, who controversially found beauty in the concrete bunkers built by the occupying Nazis in the second world war. He then set up on his own, designing strange, postmodern confections very different from the slicker stuff he does now.
Nouvel's big break was to design L'Institut du Monde Arabe of 1987, one of the grands projets with which President Mitterrand left his mark in Paris. This was more refreshing and less bombastic than most, with a 10-storey wall of light-filtering steel shutters. Inspired by the decorated screens of Cairo houses, and operating like camera shutters, it was the first of the magic surfaces that are now Nouvel's trademark.
Since then, the magic surface has taken many forms. There was a hotel in Bordeaux wrapped in a rusty metal mesh, and the unbuilt Tour Sans Fins, a 1,400ft skyscraper in La Défense designed to fade into the sky. It was backed by the tycoon Robert Maxwell, whose financial support proved as evanescent as the architecture. The Gherkin-like Torre Agbar in Barcelona, built for the water company, is wrapped in glass that "evokes water: smooth and continuous, shimmering and transparent, its materials reveal themselves in nuanced shades of colour and light". His design for the Serpentine seems to depend heavily on its bright shade of red, the colour of London pillar boxes and buses, and Hyde Park's complementary lush summer green. It will be so pervasively and completely red that it calls to mind Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea, an all-red picture of 1884 by the prototype conceptual artist Alphonse Allais.
Nouvel has also designed the controversial Louvre Abu Dhabi, where jewels of French patrimony will be displayed for payment to the French government of a cool $1.3bn. Here, Nouvel's magic surface is a shallow, inverted bowl, perforated with a web of holes, to filter powerful sunlight into an ever-shifting pattern of light and shade. It will be his most spectacular work to date.
Nouvel says that the power of the screen, the ability to compress three dimensions on to two, is characteristic of the modern age, as is the ever-increasing virtuosity of building materials. Certainly, his approach works well with the way large buildings are now usually built: the structure and the cladding are treated as separate, almost independent, entities. The first is more the domain of engineers and contractors; the second is where architects have most licence for their creative flourishes.
He also talks of the power of the image and at One New Change his biggest move is to create a powerful new view of the dome of St Paul's, which makes it into a snapshot, or an icon. The dome also gets reflected, in a typically Nouvelian game, on the fragmented surfaces of the building and with different degrees of clarity and opacity.
But it's tempting to think that Nouvel's love of two dimensions is partly because he is uncomfortable working with three. Nouvel doesn't draw, which was once considered an essential skill in the shaping of architectural space.
When it comes to organising volumes, or making rooms, his buildings are often rudimentary. Their scale is often awkward. The aqueous skin of the Torre Agbar makes it a fascinating object on the skyline – more so than the Gherkin – but at close quarters, where it crashes into ground level, it is horrible.
Nouvel's method is to translate crazy concepts into sensuous surfaces and striking images, on which his projects stand or fall. They can be beautiful, or intriguing, or a bit bling or a bit disco, or sometimes plain unconvincing. In those projects where the making of a surface is not the main concern, things tend to fall apart. One example is the catastrophic Musée du Quai Branly, close to the Eiffel Tower, an inchoate and clumsy series of spaces that do nothing for the ethnographic collections they house.
Few architects have the ability to be as good and as bad, at the same time, as Nouvel. He shows how far a contemporary architect can go by working almost entirely in the realm of image. He also shows that other things, like detail, and the shaping of rooms and sequences of spaces – the things he doesn't bother with all that much – do still matter.
He was a slightly surprising choice for the Serpentine pavilion. He is not quite a giant at the level of Frank Gehry, or of the moment in the way that last year's designers, Sanaa, were. The pavilion is supposed to be by architects who haven't built in London, which the admittedly unfinished bulk of One New Change contradicts. I hope they weren't thinking that his pavilion would be a calling card to the wealth of Abu Dhabi, where Nouvel is building his Louvre. But it, like its architect, won't be dull. It will also be very, very red.
Ten years of the Serpentine’s star pavilions
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 22, 2010
Since the year 2000 London's Serpentine Gallery has been home to a series of temporary architectural creations. The summer pavilions, by the world's most celebrated architects, are a highlight of the UK's cultural year. But which have best stood the test of time?
The annual Serpentine pavilion is a great achievement based on some dodgy ideas – that architecture can be made into a collectible artwork, and that it can work its magic independent of use or purpose. Also that hiring a famous architect is the same thing as achieving a great building. Also that you can build structures at a speed and in a way that makes considered detail almost impossible without the quality of the finished work suffering. The achievement is that it has created a series of intriguing, sometimes beautiful, occasionally dud structures that have livened up our summers. The series has given glimpses of what architects can do with space, structure, material, light and nature, and the human habitation of these things.
The Serpentine pavilion was invented 10 years ago, in the year of millennium fever. It was not funded by the national lottery or the Millennium Commission, and sought to deliver no sonorous messages about modern Britain, but it crystallised the feeling that we were in a new century and that, somehow or other, this should be celebrated with new architecture.
Each year, architects were asked to design and construct, in a breathless six-month period, temporary structures outside the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, and had the freedom to try out ideas that the planners would have ground into dust had they been permanent. The gallery's rules were that the pavilions had to be designed by leading architects who had built nothing in Britain, and those at the spectacular, eye-catching end of the profession were favoured. Grabbing the attention of the media was, after all, one of the objectives.
The pavilions were presented as artworks and put up for sale to collectors with the help of the estate agents Knight Frank. They also drew heavily on sponsorship in kind – building materials and skills given free and expertly marshalled by Peter Rogers, of the property developers Stanhope, who is one of the unsung heroes of the pavilion project. The structures were prodigies of the arts of fundraising and PR. They were unveiled to the world with compendious lists of sponsors' names and logos attached. Long rounds of glamorous parties were held to justify the sponsors' investment. The pavilions flourished at the fertile intersection of art, glamour, corporate sponsorship, iconic architecture, PR and property development. They became part of the summer season, like Henley or Cowes with a radical edge.
Inadvertently, they have become excuses for London's failure to achieve comparable levels of design or imagination in the everyday, permanent spaces of the city. The rise of the Serpentine pavilion accompanied a profligate construction boom, yet the list of the pavilion's designers is also a list of architects not invited, with one or two exceptions, to contribute anything else to London. The success of the pavilions allows the city to look more architecture-loving than it actually is. Clearly, this is not the pavilions' fault.
2000: Zaha Hadid
The first pavilion was created to shelter a fundraising dinner, attended by luminaries including Sting, Steve Martin and the Duke of York, to celebrate the gallery's 30th anniversary. Its aim was to "radically reinvent the accepted idea of a marquee". A folded triangulated structure rose and fell to define different internal spaces and vary the degree of openness. Inside were ranks of angular tables, in shades graded from pale to dark grey.
Hadid was then the world's great unbuilt architect, with few completed buildings but a huge international reputation based on the promise of her extraordinary drawings. The structure was only supposed to last for a week, but the then culture secretary, Chris Smith, liked it so much that he persuaded the planners to let it stand for three months. The pavilion was not one of Hadid's finest works: it was built in a hurry and with difficulty, and it had something of a lashed-together quality. It wasn't as assured as it might have been, but it pioneered an idea – the excitement and interest it aroused got the pavilion concept going.
It was bought by the Royal Shakespeare Company and reassembled in the car park of Stratford's Globe in 2001, after which it was given to a local farmer. One of the angular tables is in my living room: its splayed legs have a habit of tripping people up, which inspires a kind of exasperated affection.
2001: Daniel Liebeskind with Arup
In 2001 Libeskind was famous for his first major international building, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, finished in 1999 when he was aged 53. He was also still hoping to build the Spiral, an extension to London's Victoria and Albert Museum composed of cascading, ceramic-clad planes, which had somewhat miraculously got planning consent from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The extension eventually foundered on funding issues.
Libeskind's pavilion, called "Eighteen Turns", was created with the engineer Cecil Balmond from Arup who collaborated with Anish Kapoor on the gigantic ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture proposed for the 2012 Olympics. The pavilion was an origami-like composition of aluminium panels that folded up and over each other, creating overlapping spaces: some more intimate, enclosed from the park and the elements.
Greenery reflected in the metal, creating a 3D collage of nature and structure. It was less freighted with significance than other projects of Libeskind's, and also more light-hearted and direct in its appeal. Bought by an anonymous buyer, it re-emerged outside Fota House in Cork, as part of its European City of Culture programme in 2005. Not sighted in public since.
2002: Toyo Ito with Arup
Perhaps the most satisfying of Serpentine pavilions, the 2002 building had an intricate and enigmatic steel structure. It was something like a late-Gothic vault gone modern, with an apparently random arrangement of intersecting lines. It had, in fact, an underlying pattern, based on an algorithm of a cube that expanded as it rotated. Panels between the lines were solid, open or glazed, creating the semi-internal, semi-external quality that is common to almost all the pavilions. The building managed to achieve both a powerful presence and, in its white interior, a dazzling brightness. Lime-green chairs by Ross Lovegrove added to its gaiety.
It was designed by Toyo Ito who worked, like Daniel Libeskind, with Cecil Balmond of Arup. Ito had recently completed what is still his most impressive work, a Mediatheque (that is, a library with several kinds of media in it) in the Japanese provincial city of Sendai. Like many pavilion designers, he has not had a sniff of another London project since.
His pavilion, however, has had the most prominent afterlife of any. It was bought by Victor Hwang, then owner of Battersea power station, as a visitor centre for his proposed development there. It is now used for events at his Hôtel Le Beauvallon, overlooking St Tropez in the South of France.
2003: Oscar Niemeyer
The 2003 pavilion came with a great story: the then 95-year-old Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, who worked with Le Corbusier on Rio's prewar ministry of education, and who created the most dazzling landmarks of Brasilia, would make his London debut. It was like getting Carmen Miranda to turn up and do a gig.
The reality wasn't quite as good as the story. Niemeyer did some sketches in Brazil, which were translated into a building, but it lacked the effortless swoop of his best work. Nor did it quite catch the light-on-its-feet spirit of a temporary structure. It was made of steel and concrete, and had a basement, more like a permanent building that happened to have a short lifespan. Faintly saucy drawings, based on Niemeyer's many decades of fascination with the female form, decorated the walls. But it was still better to have a Niemeyer in Britain than not to have one.
The Niemeyer pavilion, along with the Siza, Koolhaas and Eliasson structures, was bought by a single anonymous buyer for a "considerable sum … many millions", and all four are in storage. The buyer intends that they will one day be seen again in public. He says he does not want them to become "private follies".
2004: MVRDV
In about 2002 the Serpentine's director asked me for my thoughts as to who might design future pavilions. MVRDV, I said. Who are they? she asked. Rising stars of Dutch architecture, I said. We need someone more established, she said. How about Alvaro Siza? I replied. I therefore felt a modest pride when both MVRDV and Siza were successively chosen to design pavilions. MVRDV's, however, was the one that never happened. It was invented at the peak of the great noughties concept boom, when nothing seemed too impossible or outrageous, and the idea was to bury the entire Serpentine Gallery beneath an artificial mountain, up which the public would be able to promenade.
It was an inspired departure from the idea of a more-or-less-pretty object standing on a lawn, but it was extremely challenging in terms of issues such as budget, difficulty of construction, and disabled access. As a result, there was no pavilion in 2004. The Serpentine still hoped to build it in subsequent years but eventually gave up the attempt. Like the gigantic tower that Gordon Selfridge wanted to build on his Oxford Street store, it has joined the ghostly legions of London's great unbuilt.
2005: Alvaro Siza/Eduardo Souto de Moura with Arup
Alvaro Siza, and his ex-pupil Eduardo Souto de Moura, are two Portuguese architects noted for a certain simplicity and lightness of touch. They typically work with plain walls of stone or white plaster, and rely on subtleties of light, space and material. Siza, now in his late 70s, is venerated for his patient, consistent, unflashy work.
Generally the Serpentine Pavilion favours spectacular more than subtle architects, as the 2005 edition confirmed. Siza and de Moura designed a low, humped roof of interlocking laminated timber that "created a dialogue" with the gallery's permanent building.
The roof turned into sloping walls, which stopped a few feet off the ground, like a big skirt. This created a cut-off view of the surroundings from inside the pavilion. It offered a few quietly rewarding moments, but it didn't zing. That it looked like a tortoise didn't help.
2006: Rem Koolhaas with Arup
Rem Koolhaas, always suspicious of architecture for its own sake, intimated scepticism about the pavilion concept, but with his collaborators came up with an instantly appealing monument. His big idea was to create a gas-filled balloon, or "cosmic egg", that would hover above an "amphitheatre". The balloon echoed the inflatable structures beloved of radical 1960s architects. It was designed to rise in good weather, opening up the amphitheatre to fresh air and views of the sky, and descend again to keep out rain.
It proved a cumbersome way to manage the environment, although there was something hallucinatory about the appearance of this luminous orb, like a grounded moon, in the park. The balloon was more a sign of spontaneity than the reality. But more than any other pavilion, it became a place of public exchange thanks to the events devised by Koolhaas and Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. The most memorable were the 24-hour interview marathons, in which, for example, you could hear Gilbert and George discourse at 6am. Koolhaas's practice OMA has had more success in London than most pavilion designers. Its Rothschild Bank HQ is going up in the City, and he masterplanned the proposed conversion of the Commonwealth Institute to rehouse the Design Museum.
2007: Olafur Eliasson/Kjetil Thorsen
The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson was billed as the lead designer of the 2007 pavilion, assisted by Kjetil Thorsen, of the Norwegian architects Snøhetta. This didn't quite hit the right note, as the whole point of the pavilion until then had been that it was the work of architects in the grounds of an art gallery.
It also didn't help that Eliasson had created a smash hit in London's other series of high-impact temporary structures, the Unilever commissions at Tate Modern. His Weather Project of 2003, with its artificial sun and reflecting ceiling, had thousands lying on the ground as if in a hippy sci-fi movie.
Eliasson's Serpentine pavilion was tamer. It was a timber-clad spiral that allowed you to go to the top, look at the view, and go down again, while experiencing some quite nice bits of design on the way. The Snøhetta/Eliasson collaboration produced the much more powerful National Opera House in Oslo – the roof of which acts as an artificial hillside in the middle of the city. Their Serpentine pavilion was perfectly nice, but one of the least memorable in the series.
2008: Frank Gehry
Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Düsseldorf, Prague, Dundee and Bilbao all have permanent buildings by Frank Gehry but somehow London, with its prodigious appetite for construction never got round to it. As he is now past 80, the 2008 Serpentine Pavilion is likely to be the great Canadian-born Californian's first and last appearance in the capital.
The commission gave him the chance to return to the direct style of his earlier career, before the Bilbao Guggenheim made him into a specialist of elaborately curving glossiness. He also saw it as a chance to give experience to younger people in his office, including his son Samuel. Made of chunky pieces of timber, it comprised a "street" running axially towards the gallery, sheltered by flying planes of wood and glass. Banks of seats on either side also gave it the quality of an amphitheatre.
"It had to be wood – I'm Canadian, right?" was how Gehry described it. "And then we were thinking of those old catapults. This is Britain, and the Romans invaded you. I came up with the idea of a four-poster structure with a big pillar in each corner and it looked OK, but it needed to be a little more festive. Then Sam made a model with butterflies flying through it, and that turned into the glass roof."
Like most of the pavilions it was sold to a private and anonymous buyer.
2009: Sanaa
By 2009, it began to feel as if the Serpentine Pavilion idea might be running out of puff, but the Japanese architects Sanaa came up with one of the most delightful, as well as the most delicate yet. Sanaa's two protagonists, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, designed a thin, freeform aluminium roof which, as they put it, drifted "like smoke" between the trees. It had no walls, but was supported on skinny poles. It reflected sky and grass and when it rained its mirrored soffit made it look as if rain was falling upwards. It "expanded park and sky," as they also put it, and "melted into its surroundings".
Architects talk like this quite often but on this occasion the building did what they said.
The Serpentine Pavilion has always had a close relationship with the Pritzker prize, the award that is the Nobel Prize for architecture in all but name. Eight pavilion designers have the prize, including the architect of the forthcoming 2010 pavilion, Jean Nouvel. This year Sejima and Nishizawa joined the Pritzker gang. The private buyer of the pavilion, again, remains anonymous.
2010: Jean Nouvel (pictured top)
The 2010 pavilion will be in a vivid red, intended to contrast with the green of the park, and evoke London buses, post boxes and phone boxes. It will also, according to the Serpentine, be "a contrast of lightweight materials and dramatic, metal, cantilevered structures". It will have "bold geometric forms, large retractable awnings" and a 12m-high, sloping wall rising above the lawn. Table tennis will be added to the pavilion's usual programme of talks and cafe and there will be a "Marathon of Maps for the 21st Century", in which "artists, writers, thinkers and scientists will present maps encompassing their experience of the world today".
The architect is the Parisian Jean Nouvel, who first came to widespread fame with his Institut du Monde Arabe in 1987. There, he charmed people with a wall of steel shutters, inspired by the traditional perforated screens of Cairo, that opened and closed like the aperture of a camera. Generally, his work combines a sensuousness of surface, a touch of showmanship and outbreaks of harshness. He has no house style, using different techniques on different projects. His work includes the forbidding, black law courts in Nantes and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where layers of glass generate a field of reflections. He designed a luxury hotel in Bordeaux wrapped in rusty metal screens and the Torre Agbar in Barcelona. The latter is like London's Gherkin in form, but has a more intriguing wrapping of layered and coloured glass. Like the Gherkin, it is more interesting for its effect on the skyline than for the abrupt way it descends on the streets. Nouvel is now working on an outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, where he has designed a huge, shallow dome like an inverted saucer that is perforated to create dappled patterns of light.
From Tokyo to Hyde Park: seven years of Sanaa architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 30, 2010
As Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (otherwise known as Sanaa) are awarded the 2010 Pritzker prize, Jonathan Glancey looks back at some of their greatest buildings
French architect Jean Nouvel to design Serpentine gallery’s summer pavilion
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 26, 2010
Nouvel invited to take on the 10th commission in London gallery's annual exhibition of temporary architecture
French architect Jean Nouvel, 64, has been invited to design the 10th Serpentine gallery pavilion, it was revealed today. The dramatic design, which consists of bright red geometric panels with retractable awnings, is part of the gallery's annual series of temporary summer works. Visitors will find the Pritzker prize-winning architect's pavilion has been rendered in pillar-box red, to contrast with the lush green lawns of Hyde Park.
The Serpentine commission has become a site for international experimentation and follows a long tradition of pavilions by some of the world's greatest architects, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. The structure will be made of glass, polycarbonate and fabric, and will also house the installation Heartbeat by fellow Frenchman, artist Christian Boltanski. It's a good week for Nouvel, an unpredictable but highly-regarded architect, as his plans for the National Museum of Qatar will also be unveiled in New York today.
Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine's director with Hans Ulrich Obrist, her co-director, said they were "thrilled" that Nouvel had accepted what is the only commission of its kind worldwide. The pavilion will be open from 5 July until 20 October 2010.
Architect Jean Nouvel: today the Serpentine, tomorrow the world | Steve Rose
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 24, 2010
One day he's designing the 2010 Serpentine pavilion, the next the National Museum of Qatar. Jean Nouvel is one of the most exciting names in architecture – and he's unstoppable
The announcement that Jean Nouvel is to design the next Serpentine pavilion can only be a good thing. First, because his design looks rather fabulous already – a glaring primary-red structure that unapologetically screams its presence in the polite leafiness of Kensington Gardens. And secondly, because Nouvel is more than ready for his closeup. Despite a towering reputation on the global architectural scene, the 64-year-old Frenchman is far from a household name in this country (like previous Serpentine pavilion designers, he's yet to complete a building in the UK). But he should be, and almost certainly will be within the next couple of years. He's one of the most imaginative, agenda-setting designers on the planet, but his innovations are so diverse and plentiful, he's never acquired an easily definable signature style. He does at least have a signature look – he bears more than a passing resemblance to Dr Evil in the Austin Powers films. But Nouvel is destined to take over the world in a good way.
While the Serpentine's choice of architects over the last few years has been first-rate, on occasions the results haven't been. Last year's pavilion by Japan's Sanaa – a minimal, splodge-shaped mirrored roof supported by stick-thin columns – didn't match the high standard set by predecessors such as Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito and Frank Gehry. Alvaro Siza's 2004 effort was compared to the dividers in a cardboard wine box – Siza never even visited London before he designed it. And the notoriously silver-tongued Rem Koolhaas stumbled on an unfortunate analogy in his 2006 design by making a pavilion filled with hot air. But there's nothing half-hearted about Nouvel's design. The saturated redness and the angular geometry are clearly a homage to the celebrated Bernard Tschumi's deconstructed follies in the Parc de la Villette in Paris, not to mention one of Ed Ruscha's gasoline stations. But this year's pavilion promises to be a sensory rather than cerebral delight. The polycarbonate panels will bathe the building's spaces in a very un-park-like red light; and what's inside it? Ping-pong tables! How delightfully French – the very opposite of Koolhaas's hot air.
Nouvel's design will surely win him a new contingent of British admirers, but his world domination will be sealed by his work in the Middle East, particularly his new Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, which is due to open in 2012. This is the new building I'm most looking forward to in the world right now. It is sandwiched between two culture palaces designed by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, two of the most recognisable architects on the planet; but where they've both given free rein to their stylistic excesses, Nouvel has designed a beautifully simple open gallery enclosed by a giant but shallow dome. A semi-transparent lattice, the dome will filter the glaring Gulf sunlight to create a calm, dappled oasis inside. It makes its neighbours look loud and trashy.
This is how Nouvel operates. You could file some of his simpler steel-and-glass buildings alongside those of Norman Foster or Richard Rogers (his Torre Agbar in Barcelona looks a little like Foster's Gherkin, for example), but then he'll pull out a surprise like his Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, whose external walls are covered in vegetation, or last year's DR Concert Hall in Copenhagen, a giant blue cube with a stirring, sweeping wood-lined auditorium.
He's blazing ahead with an architectural language of his own: steadfastly modern and technologically sophisticated, but formally bold and aesthetically nourishing, too. If he has a signature, it's one of space and light, not form. The most common material in his buildings is glass, and he's fascinated by the effects that can be achieved with it, many of which he was the first to isolate. For his breakthrough World Arab Institute in Paris, for example, he devised an ingenious wall of circular mechanical louvres, like complex camera irises, to filter the light. A maintenance nightmare, apparently; but, like his Abu Dhabi Louvre, a brilliant, high-tech updating of traditional Arab architecture.
A few days after the Serpentine announcement, he has already unveiled another show-stopping design: a vast new National Museum of Qatar. This is a cluster of giant intersecting discs, inspired by a desert rose, Nouvel explained, while its loose circular collection of pavilions refers to a Bedouin caravanserai. Whether on these grand scales or in a little corner of a London park, Nouvel seems to be full of fresh ideas.
Serpentine pavillions past and present
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 24, 2010
Jean Nouvel has been invited to design this year's Serpentine pavilion. As he reveals plans for a gravity-defying scarlet structure, we look back on a decade of daring designs