To be frank, Frank, it’s daft yet deilghtful

Posted by JJ on Tuesday, July 29, 2008

by Stephen Bailey

Frank Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion is wonderful and absurd. Wonderful because it is exuberant. Wonderful, too, simply because it exists (if only for three months). Absurd because it repudiates logic. But, then, temporary buildings are licensed to be free from the surly bonds of reason. In any case, it can’t be reproached for any lack of functionality: the function of the Gehry Pavilion is to accommodate an antic summer party. If frivolity was part of the brief, it has been amply fulfilled.

This is the eighth anniversary of the Serpentine Pavilion, a happy conceit of Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery’s director. Each year, an architect who has not built in Britain is invited to publish his manifesto. Or, indeed, hers, since the very first Serpentine Pavilion was by Zaha Hadid (and how tame the photographs look now). The list of contributors thus reads like an architectural Salon des Refusés: Daniel Libeskind (2001), Toyo Ito (2002), Alvaro Siza (2005). There have been cock-ups : the design of MVRDV, an ambitious Rotterdam practice, was unrealised in 2004 and last year Olafur Eliasson was late. But in all essentials, the Serpentine Pavilion is a brilliantly successful tradition. For good or bad, it provides priceless insight into thwarted architectural imaginations.

More from The Observer