Frank Gehry's design for this summer's Serpentine pavilion
The Serpentine Pavilion has become the perfect way to inject some international architecture into Britain without frightening the horses. And after Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Alvaro Siza, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind and more, who better to make their mark this year than one of the biggest, most horse-frightening names out there, Frank Gehry?
Gehry's flamboyant forms have made him one of the pre-eminent architects of our age, but it's difficult to imagine anything like his radical Bilbao Guggenheim finding a home in Britain. His £300m King Alfred luxury apartment complex in Brighton is theoretically going ahead (very slowly, construction has yet to start but it has planning permission), but it's not a genuine solo Gehry project anyway. To date the only thing he's built in Britain is a Maggie's Centre, a cancer care facility in Dundee.
Gehry's Serpentine Pavilion is actually larger than his Maggie's Centre. It doesn't look like a mini-Guggenheim, which would be a little inappropriate next to an existing art gallery. If anything, with its crazy geometry and apparently nonchalant use of everyday materials, it reminds me of his original reputation-making Gehry House in Santa Monica. It looks like you could knock it up with a few visits to B&Q, but I'm sure it will be extraordinary.
Gehry describes the pavilion as "a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the pavilion", with terraced amphitheatre-like seating for events, five "elevated seating pods" and protection from the elements, of course. I was hoping for something more playfully outlandish, along the lines of his Fishdance restaurant in Kobe. Perhaps, considering our equine phobia of trailblazing architecture, he opted to play it safe.
The question is, will it make a difference? Looking at the roster of past Serpentine Pavilion architects, few of them have made further inroads into building in Britain. Libeskind has done a couple of things, but Ito? Siza? Niemeyer? Koolhaas? None of them has completed another UK building. And like Gehry, all Zaha Hadid has managed to build in the UK is a Maggie's Centre.
It was never the point of the Serpentine pavilions to act as Trojan horses for top architects, of course, but wouldn't it be good if they did?
See a gallery of Serpentine pavillions past and present here.
