“Do a belly flop.” “Spread your arms like Jesus and then jump.” The photographers at the press view for the Serpentine pavilion are calling to me: I’ve ascended a rope climbing structure that is part of the design, and they fancy a shot of a moderately respectable gent flying on to a net underneath. If the role of snappers’ stuntman is an unusual addition to the job description of an architecture critic, that’s because Minsuk Cho, the South Korean architect of the 23rd edition of the pavilion, sited outside the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London, is the first one to include what he calls a Play Tower in the project.
There’s also a small Library of Unread Books assembled by the artist Heman Chong and the archivist Renée Stall, and a sound installation, by the musician and composer Jang Young-Gyu, in addition to a cafe and events space, which are more habitual parts of the pavilion brief. All these are arranged in a star-shaped configuration of triangles and trapezia around an empty central circle. The idea is to create a place “of choices, rather than a grand narrative”, as the architect puts it, where “you can improvise, you can pick and choose your experience”.
Archipelagic Void, as it is slightly pretentiously called, is a project of many facets, which reflects the fact that Cho is a man of many ideas. In the course of an hour-plus conversation about his pavilion he fires off references to architects well known to cognoscenti – the German expressionist Bruno Taut, the Brazilian genius Lina Bo Bardi, the American visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller, the 19th-century theorist Gottfried Semper, the Mexican master of colour Luis Barragán, the Austrian-American modernist Rudolf Schindler. Metaphors pour from him. His pavilion is a star, an archipelago, a Swiss army knife, an architectural equivalent of Korean multi-dish meals; its central circle is the Buddhist wheel of life. He compares the Serpentine pavilion series as a whole to the James Bond franchise – always the same idea, but with different manifestations.
Cho, 58, founded and runs the practice Mass Studies in Seoul. Growing up in the repressive atmosphere of South Korea’s military dictatorship, he saw architecture as a means of escape, “a visa to go wherever”. He studied at Columbia University, worked in Rotterdam for Rem Koolhaas’s practice OMA and set up a practice in New York before returning to his native country, by then a democracy. Coming from “a generation where we had bad quality of everything”, he now wants to embrace as much as he can of almost anything.
The work of his practice has no fixed style. They can do the cool glass boxes of their Osulloc tea museum and their zigzagging skyscraper known as S-Trenue. “I’ve always been in no man’s land,” he says, which means that, as with recent Korean movies and music, there are few preconceptions and few rules. Seeing the world of architecture as divided between the “systematic” and “heterogeneous” camps, or “bold” and “sensitive”, he wants to be both.
If there’s a common theme to his work it’s a rather general desire to create “places for people to meet” in cities whose scale and architectural monotony threaten to make traditional urbanism impossible. So the pavilion is intended to be a gathering space, a little village of different uses, with places to sit built into the structure. The design is also about connecting with its surroundings, drawing attention to the park around it and to the 1930s, Wren-style former tea house that is the Serpentine Gallery’s permanent home. Affinities are set up in the roof pitches of old and new, and through the framing of trees by the constructions of the pavilion. The events space, a shed/tunnel open at the ends, comes up close to the old french windows of the existing gallery, making a strong connection with rooms where Yinka Shonibare is exhibiting.
The main material is timber, black-stained Douglas fir sourced from 20 miles away in Surrey, formed into barn-like structures resting on concrete piers, in places modernistically cantilevered. Despite its references to its surroundings, the new work is not self-effacing. It is a rough-edged composition of sticks and stones, of insistent rhythms and jangling angles. The orange plastic nets of the Play Tower, along with fuchsia-coloured polycarbonate windows, forestall any orientalist tropes of Zen serenity and minimalism. Regular geometric shapes are unpredictably mixed with scalene quadrilaterals. Sometimes the shadow of the building looks more orderly than the thing itself – a pure circle is cast on the ground or a triangle of light is framed in relative darkness.
It’s an enjoyable, playful, centrifugal-centripetal place, loose but distinctive, not afraid to be a bit ugly, full of contrasts and surprises, that gets a lot into its fairly small square footage. There are nice ambiguities of inside and out – the dark, enclosing roof of the events space, for example, is open to the wind at its ends and along its base. The design is characterful but not dominating. It feels like what it is – a temporary building – rather than one that wishes it were permanent. It wears its making, achieved by the manufacturing and engineering company Stage One, on its sleeve.
The Play Tower is a good addition, as sometimes Serpentine pavilions leave you wondering what exactly you are meant to do there, but it does pose another question. You might have as much or more fun, it must be said, in your local rec, and you might even find a cafe and a library nearby. But there’s still something special about clambering about a work of architectural invention, with an artist of the calibre of Shonibare on show next door.
