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Architecture - As the Serpentine opens its annual pavilion, Richard Cork wonders where our spirit of adventure has gone
Disgracefully, Britain can boast no buildings by most of the great modern architects. Where are the UK masterpieces by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe? Not on our mean-minded little islands, that's for sure. London was once offered a distinguished late work by Mies, and Peter Palumbo struggled hard for permission to build it. But eventually, after an epic battle, the city fathers turned it down. A similarly blinkered prejudice ensured the rejection of Daniel Libeskind's proposal for the Spiral at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In this depressing context, one must applaud the Serpentine Gallery's determination to commission summer pavilions by a whole range of adventurous architects. Five years ago, the gallery gave Zaha Hadid her first chance to complete a structure in this country. A year later, Libeskind was enabled to design a typically dynamic, splintered pavilion on the same site, and in 2003 the veteran modernist Oscar Nie-meyer created a buoyant tour de force there. If London had any sense, all these outstanding buildings would have been acquired for permanent parkland locations, but they were sold to private owners.
The same fate will doubtless befall the latest pavilion, designed by Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Neither has worked in London before. Siza, who won the Pritzker Prize 13 years ago, is renowned for projects as diverse as swimming pools, mass housing and restaurants. His most celebrated achievement is the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Oporto. Souto de Moura collaborated with Siza on the Portuguese Pavilion at the Hanover Expo 2000.
When I met them at their pavilion, Siza and Souto de Moura explained that it was wholly inspired by the site. Their rectangular grid of windows facing the gallery is certainly aware of the Serpentine's neo-classical windows, but the new pavilion is in no way a polite echo, nor would the Serpentine have wished it to be. The gallery's director, Julia Peyton-Jones, stresses that she wants her commissions to "constantly push at the boundaries". Risk-taking is an integral part of every Serpentine pavilion, and Peyton-Jones reveals that her recent project with the radical Dutch practice MVRDV is "the only one that we have so far been stymied on, the only one which has proved too ambitious, for the moment". MVRDV wanted to cover the entire gallery with a mountain. Peyton-Jones admits that "probably 75 per cent of my time during 2004 was taken up with this extraordinary scheme". In the end, she acknowledges, it "became a logistical nightmare, and an extremely expensive one". It remains "a project in development", but Peyton-Jones must have been intensely relieved when Siza's and Souto de Moura's pavilion was carried to completion without any traumas.
Not that the outcome lacks drama. Siza himself likens it to "an animal whose legs are firmly attached to the ground, but whose body is tense from hunger, with an arched back and taut skin". Far from treating the neoclassical building with deference, the new pavilion looks like a predator that might, quite suddenly, march forward and devour the Serpentine structure. The architects' decision to use timber beams does, admittedly, signal their awareness of the parkland setting. One large tree leans right on to the pavilion's roof, draping its leaves against the translucent polycarbonate covering. But there is nothing mild-mannered about this strange, unclassifiable building. The polycarbonate shell terminates well above the ground, leaving the lowest rank of beams open and exposed. They resemble legs on the move, and lean at an angle so that their sense of latent energy is accentuated. The longer I stared at them, the more they reminded me of the culmination of W B Yeats's poem "The Second Coming":
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The link with Yeats's nightmarish vision cannot be pushed too far. When you step inside this building, the power of the ceiling asserts itself in a surprisingly monumental way. The leaning walls take on the role of vaults, and summer sunlight gives the beams an intensely sculptural power. They have the aura of a religious interior, a place of prayer rather than a secular refuge where visitors can unwind, eat and drink. Yet we have no idea what gods might be worshipped here, and the architects offer no guidance.
All Siza and Souto de Moura provide is myriad pinpricks of light, emanating from the solar-powered electrical lamps lodged at the centre of each polycarbonate panel. After dark, these will undoubtedly reinforce the feeling that a church dedicated to some unidentifiable faith has been erected. All we do know for certain is that the structure excites endless speculation about its possible identity. Delightful to relax in after visiting the Serpentine, or after a walk through Kensington Gardens, its reptilian character will lurk in our imaginations for a long time.
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005 is open to the public in Kensington Gardens, London W2, until 2 October
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