Everything in the garden is lovely

 
10 April 2012

Yesterday was the first blindingly sunny day of the summer, or so it felt as I wandered across Kensington Gardens for the unveiling of the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion.

What faced me when I arrived, retinas burning from the glare, was a thoroughly mute black box, sucking the light into itself, and looking like, well, nothing at all: a mere space, a deletion, a blackness.

This year's pavilion, the 11th in the Serpentine's annual series of temporary architectural set pieces, is designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, a garlanded architect, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize and a figure held in little short of awe by many as, at 68, he enters the final chapter of his career. He is a man who does not usually welcome the trappings of the star architect, spending as much time as possible in his small studio in the village of Haldenstein in rural Switzerland. Perhaps the black box he has deposited on the lawn in front of the gallery is a rebuttal of the hyperactive showmanship (designers of previous pavilions included Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid) that has broadly characterised the pavilion commissions in most previous years. But there is much more to this resistance than bloody-minded introversion.

Walking up a meandering concrete path through one of the six doorways to the black rectangular pavilion, I entered a high, dark corridor, lit by openings on both sides. Through another door I entered a long, rectangular courtyard, with a studied mess of grasses and plants occupying a rectangle in the middle and a deep overhanging roof on all four sides sheltering a bench. This sheltered perimeter is quiet, shady: the sky imposes itself, stripes of sunlight pass across the plants and the walls, birds sing, bees dodge between the selection of wild-looking plants (chosen by influential Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf).

It is overwhelmingly archetypal, clearly intended as an abstracted version of an architectural setting like a cloister or courtyard. Zumthor himself refers to it as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden. Most of the talk from him, and the co-directors of the Serpentine Gallery, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, at the launch was about the effect of this closed garden on your senses. Obrist listed these variables, helpfully, in his introduction: "materials, sound and silence, temperature", and these are all indeed present and manipulated in subtle ways.

But the elephant in the hortus conclusus is of course the reference inherent in this garden/cloister hybrid to the very roots of Western culture, the mystical Christian tradition of the inviolate Eden that the Latin words call to mind. It is not simply a monastic kitchen garden; it has to do with how gardens connect us to the most universal of themes. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth." These are not the words of an artist merely engaged in the manipulation of sensory effects.

Perhaps death, life, religion and the mystical universals implied by walled gardens are taboo at the press conference of a fashionable art institution but it is undoubtedly in the background of Zumthor's thinking, even if he doesn't quite make it explicit. He has spent the past few years working on projects deeply connected with the Catholic Church. The first, a modest chapel in a field in Germany (Bruder Klaus Chapel, 2007) is made of the roughest concrete blackened by intentional charring, with a poured lead floor. The second is the beautiful Kolumba museum in Cologne, run by the catholic Diocese of Cologne (2008), which works with existing historic ruins to make an ambiguous civic monument. Neither of these projects is in any way dogmatic about Catholic faith, but both of them deal with how architecture can help us understand our place in the world.

I applaud this serious-minded attention to the most universal themes in architecture, but there is a question in my mind about whether the Serpentine Pavilion's ephemeral brief - the pavilion stands for just four months beside the Serpentine Gallery before being shipped to the anonymous collector who has already bought it for an undisclosed sum - was the best place to express it. The building doesn't look flimsy in the photos but it is simply a plywood structure with the black hessian coating applied as a surface texture. This means your footsteps feel hollow on the wooden floor and somehow the barn-like materials don't match the deadly serious thematic intent. Also, there is something slightly joyless about the project from the outside, in that it exhibits an apparently dismissive attitude to the surrounding Kensington Gardens. In his introduction, the architect spoke of how the project "gives you somewhere to shelter, away from the noise and smells of London". By the time you have reached the Serpentine Gallery, you are pretty far away from all that in any case. There was a more interesting conversation he could have had with the picturesque English landscape design of Hyde Park and the gardens.

But perhaps this is to have too elevated expectations for a temporary project. Zumthor is a great artist, and has treated his pavilion as an experiment. He told me that working this quickly was "not easy", and added, revealingly, "Why would an architect do a pavilion for free, maybe this cost me 200,000 to do. Do I want to become famous or something? No. As I have said, I have this idea about gardens I'm [pursuing]. But the other thing is vanity, pure vanity, different vanities, of the architect, of the buyer of the piece, of the commercial art world. This is a very clever business model of how to work with things. But from the beginning, I saw here a chance to really do a garden." There is clearly a tension in him about the opportunity to experiment and its commercial context, and Zumthor has navigated it as best he could.

I suspect it will be really popular when it opens to the public on Friday. The Serpentine Pavilion is, in Zumthor's words, "the intimate core of many things". Children will ignore the calming intent of the dark corridor around the pavilion's perimeter and run around in the dark for all they're worth. Adults will find a quiet, shaded place to rest, to read and perhaps to think. Such modest achievements are the goals that most star architects find hardest of all to make, and the ones we should be grateful to have in our city.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (020 7402 6075, serpentinegallery.org) opens from Friday until October 16; admission free, daily 10am-6pm.

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