Horner's Corner

Jean Nouvel’s new pavilion is now open. It’s certainly pleasurable to wander through, and the red -and it is very red – supposedly echoes the London colour of telephone boxes and buses,  coming into a  pleasing contrast with the surrounding greenery. It’s as if the very ‘constructed’ look of the pavilion comes into a kind of opposition to surrounding parkland: a nature/nurture dialectic is evoked, with the polite shrubbery of the Serpentine environs standing in for Mother Nature. Again, this works, without being very surprising: like a chord in ‘modern’ music that no longer offends the bourgeois ear.

As usual, the pavilion has a kind of very open plan,  full of gaps and angles you can enter and leave by; and it  evokes vaguely (to me, anyway) the shape of a sailing ship (simple mimesis in architecture has  also become familiar since postmodernism, but this is a bit more subtle).  As with a lot of architecture since postmodernism it seems to mean a lot (a surfeit of allusions) and be pseudo functional: all those angles and cantilevered modern planes etc, which don’t actually do much except act as a shelter for the tourist to exchange money for expensive drinks and snacks. It’s a good successor to previous efforts, although I’m not as taken by it as as I was by last year’s pavilion, or the one from 2008 by Frank Gehry (click here for more on previous years). As usual, it gets used mainly as a glorified cafe: that seems about right.

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This photograph was taken in the 1960s-70s by John Gay (Gay was the English name taken by Hans Gohler,  a German who left his native land when Hitler rose to power  in 1933;  he was not a Jew, but was disgusted at the way the Jews were being treated. He became a naturalised British subject and took wonderful photographs of this country, usually in b&w. He died in 1999.)

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Juno Temple, Agrigento – Caspar David Friedrich

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Twelfth Century cloisters at Monreale, near Palermo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ruskin really took against this thing when he saw it; for him it seemed an emblem of everything he disliked about a city he loved. I like it!

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I took this photograph of the elegant Hancock Building  a couple of years ago. I was attracted by the way the building seemed to merge with the sky, earth and buildings around it.

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One of Palladio’s most celebrated creations.

Photo: C. Horner

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This is the Senate House of  University College, London. Architect was Charles Holden (1937 ).This Art Deco building is supposed to be the inspiriation for Orwell’s “Ministry of Love” in 1984.

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Slavoj Zizek

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what most is already known for a long time.

More here

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