Until October 19, in Kensington Gardens in central London, you can visit the temporary pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery, this year designed by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. Let us recall that the gallery began to build such pavilions more than 10 years ago. Every summer, on the lawn next to its main building, an architect, who had never built in England before, erected a building that served as a cafe during the day and as a space for round tables, concerts, poetry readings, etc.
For more than 10 years, the list of participants almost coincided with the list of Pritzker Prize winners - Hadid, Nouvel, Gehry, Koolhaas, Zumthor, but last year they invited a representative of a younger generation - the Japanese architect So Fujimoto, and in this - the Chilean Smilian Radic, who had already won famous for its buildings on the verge of architecture and contemporary art. The construction of Radic, he said, continues the old tradition of park pavilions - "quirks". On an area of 541 m2, there is an organic volume of fiberglass raised on rough stone blocks, resembling either a monolith or a cocoon.
Its walls, 10 mm thick, allow light to pass through, and are also cut with “balconies” and asymmetric openings that frame the views of the park. Visitors can sit either in a circular interior space (and the void in the center outside the pavilion is not readable in any way), passing there along the bridge, or in the shade under the pavilion, on flat stone blocks.
Mikhail Belov
the architect "Actual Thought" in the field of form in convulsions squeezes out of itself not "what you please", but "what will turn out." If only something came out. They took a clean sphere, put it under the press. We looked. What happened? I should add. They stuck into the resulting pumpkin-like mass of square-sectioned consoles. We looked again. And for the sake of solidity, they put them on stone blocks, as if taken out of the Celtic sanctuaries. It is now a design method, for all occasions and for any place.
Such is the “current British-style hodgepodge” from the hands of a visiting chef for the world price list of architectural form. Parasitizing the "actual form" as a counterpoint against the background of an idyllic English landscape is an old and simple matter. It is getting harder and harder to present it as a revelation. It’s easier to get caught up in inviting foreigners who have never built in Britain to justify this dubious gesture. This year's summer pavilion, in my opinion, is a typical "architectural (c) glitch", which is once again presented as a new trend in "convulsive shaping." Nobody argues, on the ideal British lawn, anything is easy to endure. But this symbol of global tolerance and political correctness is unlikely to replenish the “treasure chest” of the treasury of “modernist achievements” in any historical perspective. Unless it will remind you that the monolith stone is cool: Wow!
In general, a formalistic hodgepodge in the style of "Wow!" began to resemble a bitter radish added to a creamy dessert. You cannot hooligan with uniform in a harmonious park environment with impunity and on a small scale: even a patient British man in the street can kick up. And then it will not seem a little, you can fly off the "grant". Something less conspicuous, as they say now, "ecological and neutral", would be closer to the sleepy, patient British consensus. In London, they suddenly kick up about the "progressive form" and then the "masterpiece of neoplasm" chosen in the competition may fly off, just as the project of expanding the Victoria and Albert Museum, interpreted by Daniel Libeskind, went off. But here is a park, a temporary structure. An invitation for a “progressive young foreigner” gives an indulgence to any “miscarriage”. They got it, replenishing the Kunstkamera of our time with another half-crushed and slightly premature creature. Score on a ten-point system: 7/1 in the parameters "ugliness / beauty".
P. S. He recalled that it reminds - a plate of aliens from a series of films with Louis de Funes about gendarmes from Saint-Tropez. The memory is sweet, but the assessment of the object has not changed.
