Each year since 2000, outside the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, a pavilion is erected by a selected architect. Usually highly experimental and visually exciting pavilions are created by those brimming with creativity and vision. This year it’s the work of Japanese architect Junya Ishigami that’s on show.
The pavilion is a mass of slate- ragged slabs overlap one other forming a single roofed area with sloping cave-like sides. Keeping the structure lifted are a sequence of pins connected to the slate by an internal steel net, which, from a distance, give the illusion that it is floating.
Ishigami’s vision was for an unspecified and ambiguous shape that can be visualised a range of different ways, sparking the imagination of visitors. He himself views the slanting roof and vertical columns as the wings of a bird dripping with rain, but the hidden complexity of the structure enables different vantage points to evoke a multitude of identities.
The form reaches the ground in three corners which help secure its rigidity. The limited contact points give the appearance of a weightless structure whilst the heavy slate roof suggests a dense rocky mountain. It plays with our imagination while emphasising “a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn”.
Junya Ishigami
Serpentine Gallery
A new post by Hanna Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, July 2019.