Summer’s here, and so is the Serpentine Gallery’s annual presentation of its symbol of summertime, its summer pavilion. But this time the gallery has spawned twins, by two very different architects: One a Bangladeshi woman from Dhaka, Marina Tabassum, the other a well-known Englishman, Sir Peter Cook. And with two very different briefs: The traditional open brief for the summer pavilion which amounts to little more than ‘show us what you can do’ (a brief most architects would kill for), and a much more specific one for the second, a pavilion for play to celebrate World Play Day on its opening day, 11th June.
The two pavilions opened a few days apart, on the 6th and 11th June, the ‘official’ Summer Pavilion, the latest in a line of summer pavilions initiated by the Serpentine Gallery in the year 2000, with a pavilion by Dame Zaha Hadid, preceding the LEGO sponsored play pavilion. Tabassum’s pavilion carries the seemingly cryptic title of A Capsule in Time but whose relevance is soon revealed through a number of clues, both formal and associative. Unlike many of its predecessors, its form and structure is very simple, comprising a linear barrel vault of coloured translucent panels spanning a series of arched timber ribs. The ribs radiate round at each end to close off the vault with apses, while three openings are formed by simply omitting the ribs in three places, thus dividing the vault into four segments. One of the segments is movable, though the benefits of this limited flexibility are debatable, the capsule-like form remaining fixed.
Externally the pavilion’s formal simplicity has an archaic Ur-like character, somewhat akin to that of a Neolithic burial chamber, with the missing segments giving a sense of decay, though its rust coloured facetted cladding alludes to something altogether more than an ancient ruin – it glints like some giant insect’s long abandoned shell, like the fossilised carapace or cocoon of an ancient giant beetle. Externally, the pavilion’s appearance is more that of a mysterious object than a building, so that one enters it in the way one might a ruin, almost cautiously. Where it reveals itself to be precisely what its exterior suggests it to be, an empty shell, containing (apart from visitors) nothing other than a coffee counter at one end and a solitary young gingko tree in the centre, the latter possibly a too subtle reference to time owing to the great age of the species, dating as it does from the early Jurassic. I take a seat on the perimeter bench running along the base of the vault. There is no feature of particular interest that virtually all interiors in the Western canon exhibit, and no echoes due to the overarching openings, only space and light. The translucent cladding gradates from an open slot to the sky at the apex through grey and ochre down to almost purple umbers at the base. The filtered light supposedly references that of the Shamiyana open marquees, which are erected for outdoor gatherings in South Asia. Still, it is the strong, clear vault of the enclosure that holds sway here. Slowly, a calm descends, and the meaning of ‘A capsule in time’ becomes clearer, for a short while, time stands still. In its simplicity, the timeless elegance of the arch, along with its refreshing absence of architectural pyrotechnics, in its illusion of abandonment and ruin, Marina Tabassum has created a truly poetic and contemplative space.
Tabassum’s is an architectural statement, but the LEGO Group’s Play Pavilion, a most welcome and rare realisation in this country by one of its own, the now architecturally legendary Professor Sir Peter Cook, is less explicitly so, driven as it is to fulfil a specific brief, play: to facilitate, promote and express it. Not that the burden of fulfilling the brief hinders Cook’s pavilion in any way – it does so brilliantly. And not surprisingly, as I can think of no other contemporary architect whose design ethos has been so completely that of play, play to lose oneself in exploration, to transgress the bounds of here and now’s reality and discover and suggest new forms and possibilities of living and architecture that Cook has expressed so captivatingly in his drawings for the past six decades. Play is make-believe, and here Cook has had the opportunity to make his drawn work’s underlying theme, ‘why not’, come true.
Entering this small, child-sized, jolly little pavilion, which resembles a hastily thrown-together suburban garden contraption for a children’s sleepover, is to be enveloped in one of Cook’s drawings. It’s forms, shapes and colours reveal his abiding formal preoccupations: ‘melting’ architecture, where the surrounding walls have the shape of half sucked orange lollies, their melting shapes forming openings to allow the surrounding greenery and vegetation to visually ‘invade’ the structure, and his obsession with contrasting the geometric with the organic as expressed in the loosely circular plan topped by a floating geodesic canopy straight out of one of Cook’s Sixties Archigram drawings. Inside, one is surrounded by flowing colours where the space becomes a hothouse for play. The brightly coloured acrylic walls are hardly like walls at all, loose and emblazoned with fluid appliques of LEGO bricks which, at children’s level, provide a continuous perimeter surface for their own LEGO creations. Then there are fluid ‘stalagmites’, as their creator calls them, that erupt upwards from the cushioned floor, their flame-like forms made entirely out of LEGO bricks. And to one side, a staircase winds up to the top platform of that playground essential, a slide out to the surrounding lawn.
To adapt Corbusier’s famous dictum, this small pavilion is ‘a machine for playing in’. And by association, a thing of interest to architects too, for it stands as an all too rare drop of distillate from Cook’s ever-flowing pen.
Words/Photos Alex Murray – 30/06/25