This year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion is designed by Japan’s Sou Fujimoto, the thirteenth (and at 41, the youngest) architect to accept the commission. Beginning in 2000 with a design by Zaha Hadid, the temporary pavilion has become an annual summer event for the Kensington Gardens-based gallery.
Fujimoto has created a stunning white metal structure that reaches both horizontally and vertically into space. It is comprised of eight kilometres of white steel, forged into squares that modulate layers of density and near-transparency, as if the structure was a cloud floating upon land.
Flanking the Serpentine Gallery, this wonderfully aerial, latticed structure whose footprint measures 357 square metres, is built entirely of 20mm steel poles to create two sizes of grids – 400 and 800mm. These squares collectively create solid or transparent masses, depending on the angle the subject views or approaches the building; from certain perspectives the pavilion is more diaphanous, from other perspectives it is more opaque. Fujimoto describes this structure as a ‘cloudscape’.
From afar, the pavilion resembles the repetitive strokes of an artist’s pencil which seek to create density as if being pulled off the page to form a three-dimensional sketch. These lines form a grid-like pattern creating various layers that together embody a spatiality of radiance and darkness, lucidity and closure.
“In this design process, we tried to capture what wells up inevitably from countless sketches, countless words, countless models and countless discussions,” explains Fujimoto. “For example, even the meaning of the grid cannot be defined by one word: it exists in relation to all the circumstances surrounding this project, it is something to be defined organically.”
Balance with nature
Animated by the idea of a sugar cube which later morphed into a cloud, Fujimoto’s pavilion relies upon the grid to create a balance with nature. “We got an idea that these grids could create an artificial landscape and at the same time the transparent structures can melt into nature,” he says. “So everything makes sense with the grid. I really enjoyed this strange mixture of the artificial order of the grid – it is a sharp industrial order. The whole thing is really an organic cloud-like shape. So sometimes these opposites melt together in front of your eyes. Sometimes the grid more strongly appears and sometimes the organic dominates, which creates the diversity of experience. The interaction between the body and vision is sometimes more organic and sometimes less.”
Inspired by the trees and people of Kensington Gardens, Fujimoto strives to create an ‘artificial geometry’ through a perfect balance between nature and architecture. The lattice construction of Fujimoto’s pavilion engages space differently from each vantage, working through various stages of transparency and opacity, as Fujimoto explains.
“Rather than transparency, what was important was the fluctuation from transparency to opacity. This fluctuation comes from the gaps between the thickness of the spaces, which has created a rich relationship with the nature and this architecture. And also, it has created the endless changes when you walk around the inside. It has the feeling of being in the forest. The forest is a place of opacity and transparency.”
Past and future
Fujimoto discusses with me his dream of undertaking an architectural installation at the Serpentine Gallery. Familiar with the previous twelve pavilions, he expresses his admiration of these structures which are “the rich fruition of contemplation each architect had accumulated for years and years.” Distinguishing his pavilion from these former commissions, Fujimoto explains: “I always had it in mind to open my thinking towards society pivoting on what we’d been thinking up to then, what we were thinking at present, and what we might be thinking in the future.”
Fujimoto notes how his pavilion incorporates various temporalities – past and future, analogue and digital and even the known aspects of design and the unknown eventualities of the elements. “Weather is the most difficult thing to predict so it is an unexpected beyond our imagination.”
In architecture as in art, there is the eternal debate between form and function. In her essay, Grids, Rosalind Krauss states that ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art’. Similarly, Fujimoto maintains that his pavilion evidences form which elicits function and ambiguity.
“Form can evoke the behaviour of a wide range of people. It exceeds itself while swallowing the term ‘function’. Today it can be a very limited term and our life is always endowed with super functional ambiguity. I want to create spaces where the richness of such ambiguity can be aroused.”
Beyond formal architecture
Conceding that the Serpentine pavilions blur the lines between art and architecture, Fujimoto observes how his structure goes beyond formal architecture. “I designed this pavilion as architecture, which means it is a place where people spend their time on a day-to-day basis; I mean, rather than just to appreciate this construction, the living space created becomes part of their daily life. But at the same time, this pavilion has some novelty and beauty that goes beyond ordinary architecture.”
Certainly for the subject walking through Fujimoto’s pavilion, the sense of an installation piece is inevitable, as the interaction with light and opacity forces the participant to experience the liminal space between space and pulchritude.
From computer clouds for storage to sound clouds to the recent cloud art of Berndnaut Smilde’s Cloud in Room and Fabrice Hyber’s Rain Cloud, Fujimoto explains where his cloud-like pavilion fits in to this panorama. “It is intended to be something contemporary and at the same time to be beyond the times. We have designed this pavilion as a place for people to spend their time on a daily basis and a suggestion for the future living environment. I think it is also very effective as a place for experimental performance.”
Fujimoto’s pavilion is a place for both imagining where the heavens and earth meet and, paradoxically, where people can physically interact with each other in an age when many humans spend much of their lives parked in front of their computer. This pavilion is a beautiful marriage of imagination and physical interchange attempting to do the impossible: to draw the clouds from the sky and to pull people off their computers, uniting these bodies in this glorious cloudscape.
Sou Fujimoto’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion continues until 20 October 2013. www.serpentinegallery.org
