Jonathan Morrison
Serpentine Pavilion 2019 review — Junya Ishigami wipes the slate clean
The pavilion is a remarkable addition to the Japanese architect’s experiments with natural forms and minimalism
As the old joke goes, you can only really say it’s blowing a gale in Snowdonia when loose boulders start to float around the air. Yet, in the bright sunshine and on the genteel sward of Kensington Gardens in London, the latest iteration of the Serpentine Pavilion achieves something similar — and just as preternaturally startling — casting a billowing sheet of shattered rock across the front of the old teahouse-cum-gallery and conjuring up images of Welsh quarries, northern moors, battered sea cliffs, fells and tors.
Which is all the stranger, given that the architect invited to design the 19th pavilion in the annual series is 44-year-old Junya Ishigami, based in Tokyo, and who, like all the young up-and-thrusters before him, has never built anything in the UK.
The structure seems to levitate, creating a lopsided cavern for a café beneath (IWAN BAAN)
Was he trying to bridge some sort of cultural divide with his sweep of slate, the 61 tonnes of which are held aloft by 106 wire-thin columns in a remarkable feat of engineering? Not so much. It turns out he is actually trying to tap into something ancient and universal, supranational and archaeological: this is an ur-roof, representing stone-covered shelters found in every culture and age, from medieval Kyoto to modern Cardiff. It’s just that this one seems to levitate, creating a lopsided cavern for a café beneath.
“My idea was that all old buildings must have something in common,” Ishigami says. “Stone roofs are something that you can see all over the world. But I didn’t want to create a building so much as something that is part of the landscape, that wakes the imagination, that is mysterious — some people will see a bird’s wing, others a dark cloud.”
A dark cloud has certainly loomed over the project after allegations surfaced that Ishigami was using unpaid interns, working 12 hours a day, six days a week, to bring the pavilion to its breezy fruition. Subsequent reports suggested that the Serpentine Gallery had been forced to order him to pay all his staff. He claims that it was all a misunderstanding, but admits “some university students were helping us to gain work experience”.
Then, to add to the troubled gestation, Yana Peel, the chief executive of the Serpentine, resigned yesterday in a row over her husband’s investments in a technology firm that is alleged to have supplied spyware to authoritarian regimes. She insisted the work of the Serpentine shouldn’t be “undermined by misguided personal attacks on me and my family”.
Nonetheless, the pavilion is a remarkable addition to Ishigami’s experiments with natural forms and minimalism, and one of the more memorable of the recent ones, only just pipped by the unzipped wall built by Bjarke Ingels in 2016.
What’s most intriguing, though, is the suggestion that architecture should turn to its own prehistory for inspiration, not least if our tastes are increasingly tending towards the simple, the organic or geological, even the subterranean. In which case, what could be more futuristic than a clean slate?
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