A five-pointed star will land in London’s Kensington Gardens this summer, stretching its irregular pitch-roofed arms out towards the trees. One low-lying wing will house an atmospheric tea house, another a little library, while a third will rise to a jaunty peak above a riotous orange netting playground.
The 23rd annual Serpentine Gallery pavilion, due to open in June, is the work of South Korean architect Minsuk Cho, and his company Mass Studies. The first Korean architect to be selected for the prestigious commission, he plans to create a cluster of structures that draw on his country’s vernacular timber architecture, as well as the history of the Kensington site.
“We looked at all the pavilions that came before us,” says Cho, “and realised they have mostly been self-contained objects, placed on the centre of the lawn. We wanted to approach it differently, so we decided to create a void in the middle of the site, and draw attention to the periphery.”
Titled Archipelagic Void, the pavilion will comprise five “islands” arranged around an open circular area. This eight-metre-wide central space will be left empty, recalling a madang, the small courtyard found in traditional Korean houses, from which the different wings will fan outwards, each with their own character.
A 20-metre-long barn-like volume will extend towards the Serpentine Gallery, housing an events hall for 200 people, while a polycarbonate gallery wing will stretch to the south, providing exhibition space for an invited artist. The little library room will poke out to the north – inspired by the culture of book pavilions that have recently popped up in Seoul’s parks – alongside a dark, low-slung tea house. “There was a requirement for a place to serve coffee,” jokes Cho, “but we want to get people back into drinking tea – that was the original use of the Serpentine’s building, after all.”
Finally, facing east, standing as an eye-catching beacon visible from the road, the structure will rise to a pointed peak, covering a multi-levelled netting play landscape. “It is the most shamelessly showy side of the constellation,” says Cho, “while the other portions are nestled between the trees, or making dialogue with the existing building.”
Echoing traditional Korean construction, the pavilions will be built with modular timber frames, their vertical posts standing on stone blocks (here, sadly, made of concrete), whose height will vary to accommodate the slope across the site. This mineral plinth will form a continuous datum from one side of the site to the other, so bench-height ledges in the events space become table-height counters in the tea house.
Different atmospheres will be created by the varied roof heights and profiles, as well as details such as fuchsia-hued polycarbonate windows in the barn, and the tangerine-tinted canopy above the playscape. All together, it promises to be an intriguing collage, a curious carousel of disparate structures colliding with energetic abandon. “It’s like a sundial,” says Cho, “with constantly changing conditions between the different wings.”
The eclectic nature of the scheme reflects the diversity of Cho’s output, his practice unconstrained by a single defining style. Born in Seoul in 1966, he studied architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul, followed by Columbia University in New York, and went on to work at OMA in Rotterdam, before founding Cho Slade Architecture in 1998 in New York with partner James Slade. He returned to Korea in 2003 to open Mass Studies, and has since built a reputation as one of the peninsula’s leading architects, chosen to design the country’s Shanghai Expo pavilion in 2010, and to co-curate the Korean pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale – for which he won the Golden Lion.
The Mass Studies portfolio spans everything from faceted skyscrapers in Seoul – with sci-fi names such as Bundle Matrix, to match their futuristic forms – to a curving concrete golf clubhouse on Changseon island, shaped like two kissing boomerangs. Their buildings for the Osulloc tea museum on Jeju island take the form of Miesian glass pavilions, scattered across the rocky landscape, recently joined by their new factory, built with locally made bricks that give the look of geological strata.
In Seoul, Cho recently completed the restoration of and extension to the French embassy, adding a little tower behind the cherished 1960s structure, and finished a new sculptural home for the Won Zen Buddhist group, with a similarly desegregated form to his Serpentine pavilion scheme. The office has several major cultural projects under construction, including a vertical stack of cinemas for the new Seoul Cinematheque, and the conversion of a vast former power station into the city’s answer to Tate Modern – as well as a radical public housing project, for 100 homes on top of a stormwater pumping station. After all this, the Serpentine commission is quite a change in scale.
“It was a very interesting moment for us to be asked to do a pavilion,” says Cho. And how does he expect the public to engage with his multifaceted carousel? “Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens have an interesting history of spontaneous appropriation,” he says. “So I’m excited to expect something unexpected.”
