The Serpentine Gallery's temporary summer pavilion program began in 2000, and for a long time in Kensington Gardens in central London acted as a spatial analogue of the Pritzker Prize: the same first-tier stars who made the list of laureates participated in it.
The purpose of this undertaking by the former director of the gallery, Julia Peyton-Jones, was to show the public the works of outstanding architects who have not yet built anything in England - to express a kind of rebuke to local customers who do not invite these masters to cooperate. But support for Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas and others was hardly needed - like Zaha Hadid, with whom the project began in 2000: she was then on the very threshold of her global fame.
Several years ago, the program, which by that time had spawned "imitators" around the world, shifted the focus towards young and talented architects, although among the names that should be "discovered" to the general public, there were quite "stellar", and so well-known - Bjarke Ingels, So Fujimoto, Junya Ishigami.
It was Ishigami who brought the Serpentine some trouble last year when it turned out that unpaid interns were also working on his London project - a common practice in Japan, strongly condemned in the Western world - and, in general, in his office, the situation is far from humane. At the same time, Peyton-Jones' successor Yana Peel urgently resigned from the post of director, who was blamed for the proceeds from the sale of programs for spying unwanted programs to undemocratic regimes.
Therefore, in 2019, it was widely discussed how to make the program of the summer pavilions truly relevant, in line with the agenda that has changed a lot since 2000. Its sponsorship budget is not large, but not small, and the attention of the press and the public in general is enormous, so temporary structures in Kensington Garden could help spread progressive ideas - architectural and public.
Apparently, the gallery's management heard the critics too well: the volume of "progress" in the project for the summer of 2020 is amazing - as well as the sharp turn of customers to all relevant topics at once.
It is undoubtedly very important to support young architects, and women architects too, but inviting three 29-year-old South African natives with a multicultural background, Counterspace in Johannesburg, borders on parody. Their project is reminiscent of environmental concerns - it will be made from K-Briq blocks, 90% of construction waste and produced without firing, which makes their carbon footprint 10 times smaller than that of bricks (this is an invention of a Scottish company
Kenoteq). Natural cork will also be used, reminiscent of the 2012 Pavilion by Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.
According to the socially responsible intention of the authors, the construction of 2020 will be a reflection, an imprint of places in London, closely connected with migrants living there and other "peripheral" communities. This "collage" will take shape gradually: several small parts of it will be placed in different districts of London and some events for local residents will be held there, and only then they will be connected to the pavilion. All parts will differ in color and texture, there will be “pauses” between them: all this will help to find out which place in the British capital represents this or that component.
The pavilion can be visited from June 11 to October 11, 2020 in Kensington Gardens next to the main building of the Serpentine Gallery. During the day, as in previous years, it will function as a public space and a cafe, and in the evening there will be concerts, discussions, performances. After the end of the season, it will be dismantled and sold at auction, the proceeds will go to the development of the gallery (the same was the fate of the previous pavilions).
