Horner's Corner

Tag: pavilion

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion: London, Summer 2010

by on Jul.21, 2010, under architecture, photography

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.IMG_4253IMG_4262IMG_4264IMG_4245IMG_4227IMG_4234IMG_4251IMG_4260IMG_4232

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