"The Art Pavilion: Public Sculpture or Public Relations?"

30 WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS AUTUMN 2015

Pavilions As Public Sculpture

On the fifteenth anniversary of the Serpentine Pavilion, installed every summer in the park adjacent

to the Serpentine Gallery in London, it might be time to reflect on the contemporary phenomenon of

the art pavilion. What becomes of architecture when it behaves more like sculpture, only on a slightly

larger scale? Who is it for, and what purpose does it serve? Is the art pavilion an example of public

sculpture or a case of public relations?

By Joel Robinson

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Selgascano, 2015. Photograph © 2015 Iwan Baan.

WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS 31AUTUMN 2015

One of the newest and most ob-noxious forms of sculpture is surely the art

pavilion. This is something slightly different from the pavilions of the past. Having no prescribed function, the contemporary art pavilion ratifies a neoliberal culture of ‘anything goes.’ There is usually less architecture than art here. What is at stake is often some other kind of utility than shelter, some other end than a better built environment for all. These pavilions are literally sprouting up everywhere, from New York to Singapore to Abu Dhabi, like eccen-tric spots of hedonism, mostly in cities but sometimes in more peripheral parts as well. They are obnoxious because while they pretend to be architecture as ‘public art,’ while they look ‘public’ enough and attract the crowds (and sometimes even feature the all-too-familiar over-priced espresso bar—but of course no truly public services such as restrooms!,) they are mostly a form of public relations or a publicity stunt.

The art pavilion is, if one wants to be really unfairly cyni-cal, the creative industries’ ver-sion of the billboard, even if the list of sponsors is more discreet-ly presented, with a quiet rather than brash vulgarity. In that re-spect, it might be used to shine a light on a broader problem for art that yearns for that wider au-dience on the street outside the gallery. This problem does not (or not just) refer to the exploitation of art and artists for the amusement of the so-called ‘creative classes,’ but the almost complete absorption of whatever critical

of course) in London’s Kensington Gardens. This is the annual commission of the Serpentine Pavilion. Every summer, between June and October, the Serpentine Pavilion is as-sembled just next to the Serpentine Gallery, one of London’s foremost venues for contemporary art. This program was initiated by the Serpentine Gallery’s di-rector, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000, and is now co-ad-ministered by its deputy di-rector, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. When it was started, the program specified that each pavilion had to be designed by a cutting-edge architect, who at the time

had still not realized a project in London. The purpose was to display new ideas in archi-tecture and showcase up-and-coming talent, or talent that had not yet been recognized within Britain.

As such, the art pavil-ion is like an outdoor extension of the art gallery. Only, now it is the architectural container rather than the contained that is the chief attraction. Umberto Eco had already begun to re-alize this as early as 1967, in connection with the national pavilions at world’s fairs, when he observed that the “basic ide-ology of an exposition is that the packaging is more impor-tant than the product.”1 In other words, the pavilion itself might now be regarded as the work of art, rather than the space for art (and other artifacts) that it formerly was. Inasmuch as it is

architecture, it is architecture on display. But should it not be asked what kind of decadence has befallen architecture when it is being made to sit embarrassingly

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2000 designed by Zaha Hadid. Photograph © 2000 Hélène Binet.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2001, Eighteen Turns, designed by Daniel Libeskind with Arup. Photograph © 2001 Sylvain Deleu.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2002, designed by Toyo Ito and Cecil Balmond with Arup. Photograph © 2002 Sylvain Deleu.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2003, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Photograph © 2003 Sylvain Deleu

content ‘public art’ might possess.Perhaps the most well-known

art pavilion is that which pops up every year (albeit in a different form,


idle instead of providing affordable housing, func-tional schools or hospitals, and other fundamental services?

In other urban con-texts around the world, such art pavilions might often appear alien and anomalous, being built for places that do not really suit or support them. This has the inadvertent result of exposing how vapid they are, despite whatever creative ingenuity might exist. However, this is not necessarily the case in London’s West Kensington.

Here, the Serpen-tine Pavilions enjoy a strong resonance with the past, in a

landscape built originally for Queen Caroline in the 1730s by none other than Henry Wise and Charles Bridgeman. Pavilions have long been set in gardens and parkland, where they have taken several forms: kiosks, seats, lodges, tem-ples, follies, hermitages, or mock ruins. They have also decorated many private country estates. From the 19th century, they entered the new ‘public parks’ in the form of cafes, bandstands, and other recreational structures.

Hyde Park contains several such pavilions, and boasts the memory of Joseph Paxton’s colossal glass pavilion (more of a railway shed actually) for the 1851 Great Exhibition. The Serpentine Gallery is itself housed in a former tea pa-

No two Serpentine Pavilions are alike, but common to all the struc-tures to have been tem-porarily installed here is their daring and experi-mental form. Yet, the claim that these are genuine testing grounds for new ideas rather than attention-grabbing spectacles is not convincing, especially when considered next to the more socially oriented pavilions of pioneering 20th-century architects such as Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Aldo van Eyck. Indeed, as critic Sylvia Lavin has pointed out in a recent essay on the present ubiquity of pavil-ions, in contrast to exem-plars like the 1925 L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion or the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, “Today’s pavilions are for the most part vestigial ad-aptations;” they “are no longer proleptic, having lost any connection to an advanced cultural or his-torical project.”2

These contempo-rary structures seem to be aware of and exploit a greater public interest in architecture (or architec-ture as fashion,) or even

more skeptically, a greater awareness of the uses of architecture in promo-tional marketing and property develop-ment. (The pavilions are usually bought and relocated to some other venue after being dismantled here). For the histori-an, though, the Serpentine Pavilions are also a document of movements in con-

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, Designed by Olafur Eliasson & Kjetil Thorsen. Photograph © 2007 Luke Hayes.

vilion built in 1934. It is also worth men-tioning that this area of London—known as Albertopolis—might be described as one of the world’s first ‘cultural districts,’ envisioned by Prince Albert as a museum quarter in the 1850s, at the height of empire, treasure plundering, and museum collecting.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. Photograph © 2012 Iwan Baan.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011, Designed by Peter Zumthor. Photograph © 2011 John Offenbach.


temporary architecture. For instance, the pavilions of Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001), Rem Koolhaas (2006), Frank Gehry (2008), and Jean Nouvel (2010), many of which were designed with Cecil Balmond of Arup Associates, reflect the architectural establishment’s late embrace of the deconstructivist style as popularized by Philip Johnson in an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1988. In the British con-text, this deconstructivism was enlisted as a weapon against the fairytale historicism of the Prince of Wales and his circle.

More interesting were the proj-ects by Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Alvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura (2005), and Kazuyo Sejima

and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA (2009). This is not simply on account of them coming from beyond the narrow scope of Western European and North American ‘starchitecture,’ but in terms of their integrity of vision, imagination, and craftsman-ship, and even a commitment to some of the more social as-pirations of architectural mod-ernism. Niemeyer, for instance, at least brought us back to that more optimistic mid-20th-century moment with his bold image of a lightweight upturned curving parasol hovering above the earth; with the stage that is opened up below the ceil-ing, he signposted the idea of ‘public space’ more than any of

the others commissioned here.With the pavilions of

Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen (2007), Peter Zumthor and Piet Oudolf (2011), and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron with Ai Weiwei (2012), there was encouragement of collaborative projects with art-ists (and, in the case of Oudolf, a gardener), and therefore a more explicit acknowledgment that these pavilions were now thoroughly in the domain of art. This was evident in Eliasson and Thorsen’s treatment of the pavilion as a kind of ‘spin-ning top.’3 Seeking something

new and different still, the past three years have presented pavilions in which younger and lesser-known architects (Sou Fujimoto in 2013, Smiljan Radić in 2014, and Selgascano in 2015) appear to have fully usurped the license of the artist, pro-ducing sculptural works that seemingly have very little to do with architecture other than the fact that they occupy space and allow themselves to be occupied.

While some of the former pavil-ions have simply subjected the archetypal tent, pergola, or shed to some transfor-mation or distortion, in some showy but ultimately empty academic exercise (e.g., Libeskind’s pavilion was called Eighteen Turns, referring to the sequence of angu-lar origami-like contortions in its form), others have yielded something more po-tentially exciting or thoughtful. Nouvel’s bright Red Sun Pavilion—erected in 2010 just as the architect was finishing con-struction on that crystalline ‘carbuncle’ of a shopping center next to St. Paul’s, nicknamed the ‘Stealth Bomber’—was one of the ‘funnest.’ It factored in several

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto. Photograph © 2013 Iwan Baan.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. Photograph © 2009 Nick Guttridge/VIEW.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto. Photograph © 2013 Iwan Baan.


spaces of play (chess-boards, boules, ping-pong, etc.), alongside its café and bleachers. Yet, it was really just a re-minder of how badly the ludic utopianism of the post-World-War-II era has foundered.

For playfulness in design, the pavilions of SANAA (2009) and Herzog and de Meuron (2012), with their reflec-tive canopies and spatial variations, were a lot more memorable and compelling. The biomor-phism of SANAA’s pavil-ion registered the site’s to-pography, inviting nature into a dialogue with its ‘less-is-more’ chrome surfaces. Herzog and de Meuron’s equally reflective canopy doubled as a duck pond, shelter-ing metaphorically excavated plans of the 11 previous pavilions. They had wanted “to sidestep the unavoidable problem of creating an object by ‘digging down some five feet into the ground of the park,’” so as to resurrect the shapes of the past. The ‘ghosts’ of the former pavilions were used to dictate a labyrinthine interior structure, peculiarly made of cork that took on tac-tile and olfactory qualities.

In terms of assembly techniques, Siza and Souto de Moura’s 2005 pavilion demonstrated a sophisticated and rather striking wooden space-frame. Since then, others have utilized dif-

ferent modes and materials than standard steel-and-glass construction. However, only Zumthor and Oudolf have appealed so well to the tactile as well as the visual, demonstrating a predilection for multi-sensory ‘atmospheres’ that far surpass the idea of a building as a mere receptacle, and reject the formalism that so often

leads to sculptural architecture. On the occasion of the 2011 pavilion, Zumthor stated: “The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky. Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magi-cal place.”

Fujimoto’s white-painted lattice structure of 2013, with a lightweight transparency and irregular profile, also attempted to create something atmo-spheric, and to make fuzzy “the borders between nature and artificial things;” but the stated intention of conjuring the image of a cloud verged on kitsch, when what really came to mind here was a bastard-ized take on Donald Judd’s notion of the ‘specific object’—i.e., a minimalist version of a climbing frame for toddlers. By con-trast, Zumthor and Oudolf’s 2011 Hortus Conclusus cultivated a ‘wild garden,’ a place of spiritual retreat centered on a cornucopia of perennials in various states of decay beneath a Turrell-like ‘skyspace.’ With its humble timber-frame, barn-like form wrapped in a scrim lathered with black tar and sand, it negated the urban chaos without in order to offer quiet med-

itative seclusion within.What might be

described as the phe-nomenological turn is equally manifest in the last two pavilions—those of Radić and Selgascano. Unlike Zumthor’s will to keep architecture and sculpture sepa-rate, though, these were the most sculptural. Architecture is no longer reducible to geometry and the two-dimensional diagram here, but condu-cive to a more embodied experience and encoun-ter. We are far away from modernism’s functional-

ist doctrine in these works, and closer to the unorthodox exhibition design and ex-perimental architectural work of Friedrick Kiesler (e.g., Endless House). These pavil-ions are a lot more intuitive, gestural and expressive, and even interested in story-telling, narrative, and folktale.

Radić’s 2014 pavilion, based on a papier-mâché maquette that he chris-tened The Selfish Giant, harks back to fol-lies through Oscar Wilde’s parable about a giant who builds a wall around his garden only to find that this sickens all that is beautiful about it. It has a prehis-toric and rustic aspect, with its crude to-rus-shaped, cocoon-like, semi-translucent shell made of glass fiber and reinforced plastic propped up on haphazardly dis-tributed quarry boulders. The architect has observed poetically: “At night, the semi-transparency of the shell, together with a soft amber-tinted light, draws the attention of passers-by like lamps attract-ing moths.” But for its rhomboid lookout platform, its vaguely zoomorphic form owes as much to a penchant for the enig-matic, primitivism, and romantic, as it does to his wife Marcela Correa being a sculptor.

This year, the Serpentine Gallery is celebrating the 15th anniversary of its annual commission, with the pavilion by Selgascano. Peyton-Jones stated that she wanted an especially festive pavilion to decorate the grounds. One might say that she, in conjunction with the architects of this new project, sought to internalize and thus subvert the dismissive critique of the contemporary art pavilion as little more than a celebratory tent. Designed by the Madrid-based couple José Selgas and Lucía Cano (Selgascano), it is surely one of the most colorful, ephemeral, and lightweight of the Serpentine Pavilions.

This latest pavilion resembles an inhabitable installation (as, for example, the environments of Ernesto Neto) or

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005, designed by Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond - Arup. Photograph © 2005 Sylvain Deleu.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2014, designed by Smiljan Radić. Photograph © 2014 Iwan Baan.


Above left: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Selgascano, 2015. Photograph © 2015 Iwan Baan. Above right: Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2015, designed by Selgascano. Photograph © Jim Stephenson.

some kaleidoscopic and cavernous children’s play area. Like the previous year’s pavilion designed by Radić, it has an ellipti-cal and biomorphic form, wrapped with a semi-translucent skin. However, this skin is a multi-col-ored ETFE (plastic) tautly stretched over a steel frame, and finished with party streamers on the in-terior. The white-painted bars of this frame shoot up on angles or lean arbi-trarily, as in some toy con-struction unsystematically made from joining sticks together. On the inside, the result is a forest-like maze with slop-ing floors.

Moving around or through Selgascano’s pavilion, the surfaces si-multaneously act like mirrors and win-dows, and even change color depending on the angle on which the sunlight falls. The Latin root of the word ‘pavilion’ is papilionem (butterfly), and their project is indeed like some changeable chrysa-lis. The short animated video that they produced for it, which really drives home the infantilism of this building, is called The Hungry Pavilion. It begins with the cartoon drawings of the architects saying: “One day we had a dream ....” It ends with: “And there it was, the weirdest thing you can imagine.” Since when, though, did weird become such a priority?

On the one hand, the 2015 Pavilion reminds one of the excesses and usually hollow formalism of architectural culture over the past three decades, by contrast with the more ‘serious’ experimenta-

tion at play in the glass pavilions of Dan Graham. On the other hand, it attests to the diversity and imagination of this cul-ture which, if rechanneled in other direc-tions, could accomplish much more than the provision of symbolic capital (not to mention the mandatory espresso bar). The playfulness reminds one of Cedric Price’s visionary work and Britain’s technophile Archigram collective, but one wonders if it negotiates the pitfalls of showboating, consumerism, and amusement as well as the more socially conscientious practitio-ners of the 1960s.

In her recent essay Pavilion Politics, critic and curator Andrea Phillips sug-gests that projects like the Serpentine commissions merely aestheticize, in built form, a questionable rhetoric of

participation.4 While the contemporary pavilions may flirt with an avant-gardist language of new forms and materials, all they can really do is superficially stage

“social engagement.” They disguise what she calls the “transposable commodi-fication,” “transnational branding,” and “privatized space,” of which they are really representative by constructing a “scenogra-phy of democratic partici-pation.” In the Serpentine commissions, the pavilion as public sculpture risks appearing to be more about public relations, or about prolonging some masquerade of ‘public-ness.’ But things could be different. ∆

Notes:1. Umberto Eco, ‘How an Exposition

Exposes Itself [1967],’ in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 204.

2. Sylvia Lavin, ‘Vanishing Point: The Contemporary Pavilion,’ Artforum International 51.2, October 2012, p. 213.

3. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from statements and interviews with the artists and/or architects of the pavilions, which can be found archived on the website of the Serpentine Gallery at www.serpentinegalleries.org.

4. Andrea Phillips, ‘Pavilion politics,’ Log (Issue: Curating Architecture) 20, Fall 2010, pp. 106, 114.

Joel Robinson is the UK contributing Editor for World Sculpture News and Asian Art News. He is based in London.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2015 designed by Selgascano (June 25 –October 18, 2015). Photograph © NAARO.

"The Art Pavilion: Public Sculpture or Public Relations?"

Documents