The completed buildings of the French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, although few in number, are works of strength and poise. Her recently completed leather-working workshops for Hermès, in Normandy, are a composition of variously shaped brick arches set to a rhythm inspired by galloping horses – a Roman aqueduct with the nervous energy of a stable of thoroughbreds. Her debut project, designed in a multinational partnership with the Italian-Israeli architect Dan Dorell and the Japanese Tsuyoshi Tane, was the Estonian National Museum, a statement of pride, optimism and defiance built on a former Soviet airfield.
Most impactful is the Stone Garden in Beirut, a 13-storey block of flats on which design and construction work started before her partnership with Dorell and Tane broke up, and completed after she set up on her own account in 2016. It combines textured concrete and deep-set windows with sharp angles and emphatic cantilevers to create something earthy and engineered at once, ancient and contemporary, daring but robust. In 2020 its metaphorical resilience was put to the test in an all-too-literal way, when a huge amount of ammonium nitrate on the MV Rhosus blew up in the nearby Port of Beirut. The Stone Garden was damaged, but survived.
Her Serpentine Pavilion, the latest edition of the annual temporary structures that have been going up outside the Serpentine Gallery in London since 2000, is by contrast light and low. It is a nine-sided parasol in pleated timber, as skinny as can be, scalloped around its outer edges, supported on a double ring of narrow wooden pillars. One of its aims is sustainability – to use low-emissions materials, to minimise foundations, to avoid waste in construction. It is designed to be easily demounted and reassembled, as like all Serpentine Pavilions the plan is to sell it to a collector after its nearly five-month stay in Kensington Gardens.
Another aim is intimacy. Ghotmeh’s pavilion, which she has named À table, is, according to the official blurb, a “French call to sit down together at the table to share a meal and enter into dialogue”. It is, she tells me, “about getting together to think about our relationships to one another and to nature”. She also cites her experiences of living in Beirut – witnessing the destruction of civil war from the seventh-floor apartment in which she grew up, seeing trees and plants “coming through despite the ruins” – that gave her the desire both “to bring beauty back to the city” and “to live in synergy with nature”.
Ghotmeh (b.1980) describes Lebanon as chronically misgoverned and divided, somewhere where you “feel that the country can never heal”. So she wants to make a “place of assembly” where people might “find a common future”. Inspirations for the project include togunas – structures for community gatherings in Mali, whose low ceilings encourage people to sit rather than stand. An important part of her design is an arrangement of specially designed tables and stools (versions of which will be available to buy at the Conran Shop) in a big ring under the spreading roof.
She does indeed achieve a structure that sits lightly on the ground, a convivial shelter with a pleasingly intricate ceiling and also-pleasing fine edges to its roof, a place of shade among the mature trees of its location. Its relatively rare nonagonal geometry (octagons are more common in architecture), whereby opposite sides of the shape are different from each other, makes the space subtly dynamic. The ubiquitous use of timber does, as she intends, enhance the feeling of contact with nature.
There are also things that don’t work, most conspicuously plywood screens with leaf-like patterns cut in them by what’s called computer numerical control, or CNC. It’s a cheap and lifeless technique, the stuff of online garden furniture catalogues – used presumably for cost reasons instead of the special low-carbon glass that was promised when the designs were first unveiled – that manages to make the pavilion look less floaty than you’d hope. Ghotmeh, when I ask her about these screens, seems to wince.
It’s also unclear that the great collective dining experience of which she talks will really happen. Cafe food will be supplied by Benugo, with menu ideas contributed by Ghotmeh, but this informal browsing is not the same as the grand coming-together implied by the big ring of table. There may be a disconnect here between the symbolic ambitions of the architecture and its lived reality.
Ghotmeh is a remarkable architect, but this is a not-quite-remarkable building, for reasons inherent in the Serpentine’s commission. Part of what makes architecture special is the way it is wrought, but the conditions of the pavilion’s construction – at speed, at some scale, under pressure – make its details prey to the exigencies of project management. At the same time, every Serpentine Pavilion has to carry a heavy load of public relations and cultural expectation. Its premise is that this is world-class architecture, worthy of sponsorship by Goldman Sachs, attractive to wealthy collectors, with meaningful things to say about nature and humanity.
It assumes that architecture can be traded like art, and espouses the now old-fashioned idea that the imprint of a celebrated architect (once called “iconic”) is the most crucial ingredient in creating a great building. So the appearance of brilliance is demanded, even as the constructional means to achieve it are limited. If Ghotmeh’s building were permanent and useful – let’s say as a cafe or restaurant; if its details were less compromised, and if there were less glare of expectation, it would be rightly celebrated as a delightful place to eat and meet.
All that said, and for all that the Serpentine Pavilion seems like an idea perennially near its expiry date, it does keep giving glimpses of the possibilities of architecture. The best thing that the gallery could now do would be to confront the contradictions of their concept, look at the processes by which their pavilions come into being, and work out how they genuinely can achieve joy and beauty.
