‘Public sculpture attempts to fill the gap between art and public to make art public and artists citizens again,’ so wrote artist Siah Armajani. And this is (almost) always the case with the Serpentine Galleries’ annual Pavilion commission in Hyde Park. 

This season’s contribution is by Junya Ishigami. The Japanese architect is continuing his conversation with free space philosophy here; his organic architecture is seeking to find harmony between the manmade and elements created by nature. The Pavilion design is informed by the humble roof, here constructed through arranging slates to create a single unit that appears to emerge from the grass of the surrounding Kensington Gardens. 

Ishigami’s Serpentine Pavilion is at once delicate and brutal, comical and visceral. This flowing structure, a feathered-friend bird-like canopy with its rough and irregular overlapping slabs of slate, sits on slender columns seemingly too delicate to hold the hefty 60-ton weight. You just want to touch the cold slates and, happy with the knowledge that it hopefully won’t collapse, take refuge underneath the flowing roof, sip coffee, write a few words, watch park life and the world go by.

In the architect’s words, ‘a stone creates a landscape, and a landscape usually sits outside of a building. I wanted to create the landscape inside the building, as a theory of the landscape that the stone creates outside… I tried to create this landscape that exists outside, inside the building.’  

Ishigami’s is a long-term study of the relationship between structures and landscape. So, the Serpentine commission, now in its two-decade search to create site-specific public structures that live, breathe and contribute to the life of Kensington Garden and Hyde Park for the duration of the summer seems, is a perfect canvas for the architect.  

Read about last year’s Serpentine Pavilion by Friday Escobedo here.