Photos have recently been released for the new temporary pavilion outside the Serpentine Gallery, created and designed by architect Peter Zumthor. A previous post of mine showed some concept images back at the beginning of April.
“At the heart of Peter Zumthor’s Pavilion is a garden that the architect hopes will inspire visitors to become observers. Zumthor’s says his design ‘aims to help its audience take the time to relax, to observe and then, perhaps, start to talk again – maybe not.’ The design emphasises the role the senses and emotions play in our experience of architecture.With a refined selection of materials Zumthor creates contemplative spaces that evoke the spiritual dimension of our physical environment. As always, Zumthor’s aesthetic goal is to customise the building precisely to its purpose as a physical body and an object of emotional experience. Zumthor has stated that ‘the concept for this year’s Pavilion is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time.”
I personally am very much looking forward to visiting the latest installation at the Serpentine, it is Zumthor’s first built work in the UK and looks to be a diminutive addition to Hyde Park, enclosing a solitary interior garden space in the heart of a busy metropolis.
Images: Dezeen
I was reading a very intriguing book the other day; Bill Bryson’s ‘At Home, A Short History of Private Life’ and came across some historical anecdotes of the Serpentine’s conception. In 1730, Queen Caroline of Anspach, the wife of King George II, ordered the diversion of the River Westbourne to make a large pond in the middle of Hyde Park. The Serpentine was the first lake in the world designed not to look like a manmade lake, moving away from the well-regarded and rigorously-used geometrical pools of the 17th Century; “Now here was an artificial body of water that was curvilinear and graceful, that meandered beguilingly and looked as if it had been formed, in a moment of careless serendipity, by nature.” The result became endlessly popular with Londoners, and Queen Caroline herself even installed two large yachts, despite the fact there was barely space for them to move! Perhaps Queen Caroline would appreciate Zumthor’s almost private natural retreat, as she herself made herself deeply unpopular in London when she banished the public from parks such as Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens (except on Saturdays and for a price), preferring them to be for the sole use of royalty and the respectable upper classes. I though am pleased that a piece of Zumthor’s architecture is available for us to appreciate right in our very own city.
