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The Serpentine Gallery’s Pavilion, an architectural essay that appears in Kensington Gardens every summer, pandemics permitting, tends to be a bit of a sketch. Intriguing ideas by imaginative architects get blurred by the exigencies of project management. Details don’t always survive their first encounter with the building regulations. The pavilions are temporary and built at speed, which can give them a dashed-off feel. The intention can be more rewarding than the execution.
Less so this year’s edition, by the Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally. It has what you might call architecture: scale, detail, the articulation of mass and volume and of shadow and light. It is high ceilinged and airy. It has presence and depth.
At one level, it’s simple, a big and almost circular roof supported on pillars. It’s a shelter in the park, which makes a place for events and meetings. It is unwalled, so that the interior and exterior flow into each other, and you can see trees through it and from it. It also has its own distinct range of atmospheres: calm, shadowy, a touch cooler. Outer surfaces are black, inner ones in gradations of grey, which layers the progression from outside to in. This creates a sense of the interior as a place apart.
At another level, the pavilion is complex, with irregular bunchings of elements and dilations of space. There are architectural fragments – flutings, corbels, bits of arches – enigmatically arranged. You sense intelligence, even if you don’t quite know what it is saying.
The design practises what might be considered a deception: the construction looks like concrete at a distance, apparently sculpted from a single weighty substance, but turns out to be made of plywood coated in cement. If you tap its solid-looking blocks, they sound hollow. This choice of materials is practical – it would have been absurd to have made a temporary structure out of mass concrete – and also adds an uncanny note to your perception. If its wide-spanning roof were really made of concrete it would have to work hard to hold itself up, so you’re not quite sure how heavy it really is.
It’s striking that this pavilion should be so architectural, as Counterspace makes a point of exploring beyond the discipline’s usual boundaries and canons. Its work includes choreography, film and sculptural installations. Vally looks for inspiration outside the works of recognised architects, living or dead. For the Serpentine Pavilion, she spent four months living in London, exploring and researching “places of meeting, organising and belonging” that were “significant to diasporic and cross-cultural communities”.
She sought out “lost and vulnerable spaces” and places both existing and erased. These included women’s centres, cinemas, clubs, mosques, markets, newspaper offices, restaurants, theatres, libraries, arts centres, hair salons, bookshops, childcare centres and community gardens. Also, streets of carnivals and protests in Notting Hill and Brixton and the Wall of Truth memorial to Grenfell victims under the concrete road viaduct known as the Westway.
Motifs from these researches – a piece of pilaster or a cafe table – became the raw materials in the pavilion design. There’s a touch of the Rachel Whitereads in the way that borrowed textures and patterns are transferred into the fabric of the pavilion. Not that you can trace any one element to any one source. Rather, she has created an abstracted hybrid of formal and informal architecture, a chimera that is both London-ish and not, a space for people who might belong to more than one place.
Vally also tried to learn how these communal places work as spaces of gathering and intimacy and achieve some of those qualities in the pavilion – the intention, she says, is to create “an architecture of many generosities”, a building that can be approached from several sides and inhabited at both large and small scales. Architects often like to proclaim their wish to bring people together and in so doing set themselves a challenge: what can they do that works better than sitting on the grass? Some past pavilions have included rhetorical devices – steps and seats – that tended to signify more than enact such coming together. Counterspace’s version looks more convincing.
Its strength is that it does not prescribe. It does not say “Sit down here now and talk” but, rather, establishes its own identity and character, which includes the possibility that you might perch on some piece of it, by yourself or with others. Its architectural presence helps here: the building is self-sufficient, has its own life, is not needy, its lack of desperation making the hoped-for gatherings more rather than less likely. It helps too that it is sophisticated, that it refuses the common assumption that an interest in the everyday and the communal entails dumbing down or condescension.
One factor that has made Counterspace’s pavilion less sketchy than some is time. It was supposed to open last year but, for obvious reasons, did not. It has also helped that, at the age of 31, Vally is the youngest architect to have designed a Serpentine Pavilion. She is not an established star who might toss out some ideas for a pavilion from a vast workload. The commission might be her biggest break to date, so she has given it ample attention, including those months spent researching in London.
Like any Serpentine Pavilion, this version is partly an emblem: its significance is as much in its suggestion as to what built spaces could be like as in whatever sociability can be engendered in its short life in a privileged location. This year, for the first time, there has been an attempt to spread the pavilion magic, with “fragments” of the design distributed to four locations elsewhere in London, of the kind that inspired Vally. Not all were available to visit at the time of writing but the one I did see, at the Tabernacle cultural venue in west London, was too small to make much of an impact. It’s a nice thought that could be developed in the future, but for now the mothership is the stronger expression of its ideals.
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