Junya Ishigami's Serpentine Pavilion defies gravity with tons of rock, steel and poetic precision

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Robert Bevan18 June 2019

Is it a bird, is it a plane? A cave for contemplation? A hillside or a rock-fall? Junya Ishigami, architect of the Serpentine Pavilion 2019, plays fast and loose with his metaphors but there is no denying the poetic precision of his gravity-defying assemblage of 77 tons of rock and steel.

Essentially, this year’s structure is a rippling, triangular field of ragged Cumbrian slate laid on a steel mesh that is in turn supported by a copse of 106 impossibly dainty white poles. From one end it appears as a scree slope rising towards the Serpentine Gallery building while from the other, the gallery end, it reveals a sculpted forest canopy within.

Ishigami, 45, is exploring “a new natural architecture” in his work that seeks to fuse building and landscape together. Simply, in the design writing cliché, he blurs the boundary between inside and out.

His pavilion is also a rediscovery of vernacular architecture, particularly those simple stone roofs of the kind found the world over, matched to sophisticated contemporary engineering.

However, there’s no way that it “could blow away in a breeze” (as billed) and the original dark and stormy imagery of the pavilion as a rain-lashed rugged hillside concealing a cave for contemplation is, as realised in the greensward, something far more gentle and charming — if somewhat less dramatic.

Ishigami says we should look at his pavilion like we may look at a cloud and see a whale, or glimpse in a large rock “a monstrous bird in flight, the countless layered stones like black feathers”.

He wants to bring some of nature’s randomness and unexpectedness to the art of building rather than the machine-made regularity of the everyday grid. He largely succeeds.

Outdoor art in London

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