Ishigami's vision of a curved slate roof on thin white pillars has been largely brought to life. Among the initial ideas of the project are familiar concepts: a slate roof is typical for many regions, including for Britain, the dissolution of the building in the natural landscape, the "naturalness" of its forms is also nothing new. Unless the thought of both thin and rough, powerful roof (depending on the point of view) makes this project stand out for the summer program of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Recall: next to her building (originally a tea pavilion of the 1930s) in Kensington Gardens for 20 years, every year a pavilion has been built according to the project of one or another architect who has never implemented anything in England. At the end of the season, the structure is dismantled and sold at auction.
The program is also distinguished by a very short period from the moment the project was ordered by the architect to the opening of the pavilion: about six months. The authors strive to express themselves (especially since the work for the Serpentine is an excellent advertisement), but their buildings must fully comply with British SNiPs: after all, they serve as cafes during the day, and for concerts, discussions and banquets in the evenings. The budget provided by sponsors is large, but still not infinite. Therefore, in 2004 to implement the "mountain" MVRDV
did not succeed at all, and it was urgently replaced by the construction of Alvar Siza and Eduardo Soutu de Moura. In 2007, Frye Otto's proposal was recognized as unfeasible, replaced by Olafur Eliasson and the founder of Snøhetta Hietil Thorsen, but they did not have time to finish building their version by the appointed date and therefore for two weeks they opened the "emergency" pavilion of Zaha Hadid (with the full construction of which the program began in 2000 m) and Patrick Schumacher.
Many seemingly well-built pavilions, including compatriots Ishigami, were subjected to reality editing,
SANAA (2009) and Seo Fujimoto (2013). Fujimoto has also been criticized for using interns as free labor - a common Japanese practice, but a sensitive issue for the Western architectural community. Ishigami managed to repeat the feat of his predecessor: the scandal around the interns in his office, along with the unbearable working conditions there, turned out to be even louder (we wrote on this topic in detail here): as a result, the Serpentine gallery promised the public that there was no one in Junya Ishigami for her project. + Associates will definitely not work for free.
The project in reality turned out to be much more "material" than the author promised: the slate roof looks very solid, without subtle optical illusions, for safety reasons, it was necessary to significantly add, for the same reason, instead of completely free, "unlimited" space in the interior at the insistence of the engineers AECOM now has polycarbonate walls - otherwise tables and chairs will fall from the wind.
However, the architect is not discouraged: he changed the set of metaphors and
now speaks of a huge blackbird that descended to the ground in the London rain: the roof is its wing, the slate plates are the feathers, the supports are the jets of water.
There is one more problem: on the day of the promised presentation of the pavilion, the board of trustees of the gallery announced the resignation of its director, Jana Pil. In 2016, she replaced the famous Julia Peyton-Jones, who invented, among other things, the summer architecture program; she left to pursue her own projects. Peel has now quit so as not to drag Serpentine into a political scandal: she and her husband own a computer software company that, among other things, supplies software for spying on opposition leaders to the leaderships of Saudi Arabia and Mexico (more about this story -
here and here). At the same time, Jana Peel, as a curator, talks a lot about human rights and freedom, and their embodiment in art.
This story, of course, did not grace the opening of the Serpentine Pavilion, but it is unlikely to affect it and the gallery. Much more important are the topics that
Oliver Wainwright, the architectural critic of The Guardian, raised in connection with the difficulties of the implementation of the project Ishigami: the constant rush is not very clear why it is impossible to start work earlier (time would help to solve many problems: this is recognized by both the architect and the contractor and the engineers) or to make the program not annual, and biennial? There also remains the question of the deliberate non-functionality of the pavilions, which, as the journalist emphasizes, in the summer serve for the entertainment of sponsors, and then decorate the estates of collectors. Why not immediately set the task more clearly and "socially": it can be classrooms for schools, shelters from rain and sun for public spaces, and similar quite utilitarian, but architecturally interesting structures that at the beginning of their "career" served the summer as a cafe in a London park.
