It says something about the state of British architecture when the highlight of every year is a small pavilion in a park. Now in its ninth year, the Serpentine Gallery’s Pavilion, in Kensington Gardens, has become as much of a fixture on the country’s calendar as Glyndebourne and Wimbledon. Somehow you can’t imagine the British summer without a spot of rain dripping through the groovy roof of the latest avant-garde architect’s concoction and spoiling your Victoria sponge.
The pavilion is built annually not so much for sipping tea and gobbling cake as for ogling architecture at its most adventurous — alas, for a mere summer only. Once each one is dismantled, it is sold to private bidders to part-fund next year’s. The project was begun in 2000 by the director of the Serpentine, Julia Peyton-Jones, to introduce to Britain risqué architects usually banished from this risk-averse country. The idea is that once we see these architects in action, we might employ them on proper buildings.
It has been only partially successful in these lofty aims. Zaha Hadid, who kicked off the series, has finally found work here; we gave Frank Gehry (2008) a titbit project in Maggie’s Centre in Dundee; Daniel Libeskind (2001) garnered the Imperial War Museum of the North and a tiny extension to London Metropolitan University, but not the V&A extension; Rem Koolhaas (2006) is meant to be building an HQ for Rothschilds, credit crunch permitting. But Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen (2007), MVRDV (2004), Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003) and Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura (2005) have yet to find work in Britain.
But then we can hardly expect one small pavilion to completely change a nation. But what they have done each year is to give the nation a shot of pure architectural adrenalin. Most of the buildings in which we spend our lives are to architecture what Muzak is to Mozart: the pavilion, though, is the real deal.
Next month the latest project lands in the park, as light and floaty as a butterfly. It’s easy to see why the Japanese firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates) were picked: they are now perhaps the most visible Japanese architects in the world. At the end of 2007 their New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan opened to good reviews, a tower of metal and concrete boxes, offset, teetering, like a skyscraper made from children’s building blocks, frozen mid-collapse. Before that they had arrived in America with a diaphanous glass building for the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and broken into Europe with the Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany. They look set to continue, with a satellite of the Louvre in Lens, northern France, due in 2012.
“We’re not representing Japanese architecture, though,” says Ryue Nishizawa. “We’re just representing ourselves. No Japanese person says to me: ‘You are very Japanese.’ Only foreign people. But I grew up in Japan, surrounded by Japanese culture, so of course it’s there. There are many people who see Japanese character behind us. We are very much based on Japanese traditional history. Mostly very simple in organising things, simple clear and straight. Not too much complication. And very light.”
Their masterpiece, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, western Japan, exemplifies this perfectly: instead of the usual grand gesture and sequence of spaces, the pair designed a series of fiercely white little pavilions wrapped in a glass drum, the apparent randomness creating unlikely connections between the displays. Routes are not even suggested: you make your own path, your own museum.
And they promise exactly the same qualities next month in Kensington Gardens. SANAA’s pavilion, Kazuyo Sejima says, will be “like a space in the park. It’s not like a normal building. It’s more like a clearing between the trees, a meeting place”. It will be subtle indeed. A mirror-polished aluminium roof, shaped like an amoeba, is held aloft on randomly placed, slender columns, and undulates, descending in parts almost to the ground. It is without walls; within it, a squiggle of Plexiglass around an auditorium provides the only shelter from the driving winds that are usually a feature of the British summer. (The pair confess that they have spend little time in the UK between July and September.) They hope its slightness and reflectivity will make it seem, both inside and out, less a solid building than a blur, its mirrored surfaces reflecting the greenery like camouflage.
“This is not a big statement building,” Nishizawa says, “almost the opposite. It’s about transparency. I’m very interested in how to open up architecture, to have a beautiful relationship between the building and around. Tokyo is very messy, very confusing, a kind of chaos, everybody trying to be independent, disconnected from the others. In Japan there are no parks. A park is somewhere you park the car. We have gardens, but you just walk through them and look at them. The way you behave on the outside in Japan is very different. The outside in Japan is just somewhere to walk through, not hang out in. So our architecture tries to create a calm, intense space for people to come together within.”
Partnerships in architecture are as rare as humility. True, you need teamwork — you can hardly build a skyscraper with your own two hands. And there have been some quite illustrious pairings in the past: Terry Farrell and Nicholas Grimshaw, Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. But it normally ends in tears. Ego gets in the way. Which makes SANAA a curious couple indeed. Sejima and Nishizawa have worked together for 14 years, and still never a cross word. “We like each other,” Nishizawa says. “Still.” He laughs. She doesn’t. The Japanese pair are such a couple now (professionally speaking), that they finish each other’s sentences — even when speaking stilted English. Sejima, at 53 ten years Nishizawa’s senior, looks as if she wears the trousers. She’s the quieter of the two, the more thoughtful. Certainly the quirkier. She sits there like a praying mantis, all spiky limbs and lurid teenybop clothes — but chainsmoking, rather than praying. Nishizawa, by contrast, is boyish, eager, jovial and softbodied, constantly obliged to fill the gaps in conversation that Sejima is quite happy to let drift.
“When I first saw Sejima-san [they use each other’s surnames despite sitting beside one another and sipping each other’s glass of water], I thought, there’s someone interesting,” he says. “She’d come in to the office wearing this green golden dress with an Arabian Nights hat in rainbow colours. Totally crazy. I thought, she looks kind of nice. I felt she must become very great.”
They met at the office of Toyo Ito, Japan’s most admired architect. Nishizawa was a student just starting out, while Sejima didn’t even work there. She had left to set up her own office. They hit it off immediately. They are opposites, Nishizawa suggests, and complement each other. “I work long just because she does. Sejima-san is very strong. She has stronger will. I’m more female. She’s very logical. I may be more emotion. But these kinds of roles are sometimes changeable. When she becomes emotional I become very objective. Like when you go out drinking with your friends and they begin drinking too hard and you want to look after them. That’s very common in Japanese society!”
They both run their own firms outside SANAA, like ego pressure valves, perhaps. SANAA, a big, baggy, “democratic” studio of 30, they reserve for big experiments in which both can bring something to the table. They set up their partnership in the midst of Japan’s infamous “lost decade” of the 1990s, a period of economic collapse. Japanese architects such as Ito and Tadao Ando are rightly revered around the world, but have mostly tended to work in the land of their birth. They have not needed to seek reputations abroad. Japan has the highest number of architects of any country in the world — 300,000, one for every 423 Japanese — and an enviable architectural culture in which design is as much part of everyday life as sushi and manga. Starved of work at home in the mid-1990s, though, SANAA sought work abroad, with great success.
The Serpentine Pavilion, they hope, will be their calling card in Britain. Not least for their mothers. “Japanese women of a particular generation,” Nishizawa says, “they love Britain. London is their favourite city in the world. They love your Royal Family.” “My mother was very excited about this project,” Sejima adds. “She’s even getting a new passport so she can come and visit. But it might be just to see the Queen.”
The Serpentine Pavilion opens in Kensington Gardens, London W2, on July 12 (www.serpentinegallery.org)
