The Serpentine's Pavilions

With only one week left to see Jean Nouvel's design for the 2010 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, Helen Thomas reflects on ten years of the Pavilion Programme and the different designs by architects over the years.

The seed for ten years of the Serpentine Gallery's Summer Pavilions in Hyde Park was sown by a structure created for a single night.  The success of Zaha Hadid’s design for a summer pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in 2000 - an ephemeral folded and triangulated roof, held up by slim columns and summer breeze - transformed the Gallery’s annual party into an institution for the masses. Hadid’s interventions were like tents in the desert – caravanaserai for the elegant traveller that captured the spirit of the pavilion as a meeting point for the flow of commerce, information and people caught in London’s local trade routes. Though not always consistent (there were times when the funding just wouldn’t crystallise in time) the spectacle of the pavilions has continually provided a subject for discussion where contemporary architecture usually fails. And in a stroke of genius, the park is no longer a landscape, the city is a place of chance encounter, and architecture becomes a backdrop for spectacle and event.

Summer is a time to be sociable - to be out on the streets in the open air, crossing paths with friends and strangers, making friends and useful connections, and storing up anecdotes to take us through the dark days of winter. Over the years, the fleeting presence of the Serpentine Pavilion has revealed some very different approaches to creating sociable spaces. In 2008, American Frank Gehry (who, with his 2003 Maggie’s Centre already in place in Scotland, slightly broke the first-building-in Britain rules) created a fabulous two-level cul-de-sac street out of timber and suspended glass panels, where visitors could perform or spectate from deep steps on either side. Scandinavians Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen’s small tower, with its spiralling ramp and viewing platform, gave us the queue in 2007. Polish architect Daniel Libeskind’s Eighteen Turns, the second pavilion to be raised on the site, was a labyrinth of aluminium-clad planes that encouraged exploration and chance encounter. Last year, glamorous Japanese duo SANAA provided a catwalk on which to be beautiful, beneath a reflective canopy that melted into the trees. The waiting space was encapsulated in Brazilian Oscar Neimeyer’s 2003 pavilion. This was almost all lobby, decorated by line drawings of naked ladies and featuring an entertaining video of Neimeyer flying one of his own buildings around the world. The most cosy space of all was contained under the timber grid of Portuguese Alvaro Siza and Souta da Moura’s 2005 design, a curled up woodlouse beneath the trees.

Strangely, the site for the pavilions is not surrounded by parkland, but caught between the gallery and the road on the building’s front lawn. Bordered on the other two sides by hedges, trees and paths, the pavilions become either an object within an outside room, or a room within a room, giving them a hermetic quality. The presence of some transcended these boundaries: in 2006 Rem Koolhaas’s silvery dome was a magical presence above the trees when seen from Exhibition Road. That summer was dreary, and we were always waiting for the balloon to rise up in the sun, but it almost never did. Instead, like a giant stopper, it tapped the fermentation of the intense cultural programme taking place within. Other pavilions, like Japanese architect Toyo Ito’s 2002 structure, were nonchalantly unaware of the site, treating this garden room as a white cube.

French architect Jean Nouvel’s design for the 2010 pavilion probably comes closest to Libeskind’s design process in spirit, in that it references a project with a strong philosphical and theoretical basis. Representation of the architecture of the designer’s home country is an underlying current in the pavilion programme, and Nouvel’s design, which takes a formal lead from Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi’s 1983 red follies of the Parc de la Villette, in Paris, is a French national pavilion in a ghostly, diachronic world fair. By referencing Tschumi, Nouvel cleverly links the pavilion to an intellectual and abstract cultural heritage with a minimum of effort. French philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida are already embedded for the architectural cognescenti, while for the partygoer vampires are fashionable this year and, this summer at least, the red night never ends.

Helen Thomas is Senior Architectural Editor at Phaidon