The Serpentine Commissioned Two Pavilions This Year, in London and Beijing. How Should We Read Each One?

How did architecture, art, commerce, politics and culture all get tangled together?

This year's Serpentine Pavilion, by the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, is a courtyard walled in by a "lattice."

The Serpentine Gallery, in Kensington Gardens in London's Hyde Park, is one of Britain's best-known museums of modern and contemporary art. Every summer since 2000 it has invited an architect (sometimes an artist) or a design team to build a temporary pavilion on the lawn in front of its main entrance. The Serpentine Pavilion stays up for three months and is free to the public. (We have written about pavilions from earlier years.)

The pavilion is now one of London's summer attractions, and the program has become one of the most prestigious architectural commissions in the world. The architect who gets the invitation is watched closely too, because — in The New York Times' phrase — the project is treated as a leading indicator of where the next international masters will come from.

The first year went to the late Zaha Hadid, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2004. In 2012 the invitation went to Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron (HdM), the firm behind the Bird's Nest. Olafur Eliasson, the artist we wrote about a few days ago for the "Fjord House" headquarters he designed for a financial company, built a pavilion in 2007.

London

Frida Escobedo, at 38, is the youngest architect the program has commissioned, and the first woman since Zaha Hadid. When the Serpentine's email arrived, her first thought was that she had landed on a mass mailing list.

Up close, the walls of her "lattice" pavilion turn out to be concrete tiles stacked one on another — not flat, but each tile turned 90 degrees against the next, and because the tiles are curved you can see straight through the gaps between them. "You can see the influences of Mexico and Britain converging here," is how the gallery's director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and its CEO, Yana Peel, describe the work.

The Mexican half is the perforated wall, or celosía, drawn from the breeze walls of Mexican architecture — a wall you can feel the air move through. The gray concrete tiles are mass-produced in factories and are a common roofing material in Britain.

Two more features inside the pavilion catch the eye: a curved, reflective ceiling overhead and a shallow pool underfoot. The review in The Guardian put it this way: "Escobedo has stolen a march on a treacherous summer — by designing an indoor pool to make sure eager visitors leave with wet socks."

At the press preview, before the public opening, the writer noticed people tiptoeing into the water — "as if trespassing into the pristine new pool of a luxury apartment." He hoped that when the pavilion opened to everyone that weekend, "more people will turn their feet into paddles — go for a paddle — and bring this serene, elemental place back down to earth."

In plan, the pavilion is two overlapping triangles. The outer walls line up with the edge of the gallery behind them; the inner courtyard lines up with the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, ten miles away. Escobedo says that this act of homage resolves a contradiction built into the pavilion: going by past years, the "temporary" structure will end up permanently in someone's collection — a museum's, perhaps, or another institution's.

The architect's logic here is a bit of a leap. But it points to something true. These buildings — one a year, each built within six months and shown for three — may be temporary only in the telling. The temporariness gives people more to talk about and extends the reach of the summer program. An invitation has become a form of praise inside the profession: another laurel for architects who are already famous, and, for those on the way up (though already known), a push forward.

None of this is meant to diminish the architects and artists involved. The summer pavilions really are good work, above all in how they test and widen the boundaries of architecture.

In the program's 11th year, the British critic Rowan Moore, who studied architecture at Cambridge, wrote in The Guardian: "The project is a huge success built on some rather dubious ideas — among them that architecture can be a work of art worth collecting, and that architecture can work its magic detached from function and purpose."

A pavilion is also usually more than a building or an installation. It has sociability — people gather in it for events, talks and the like — which widens its reach further.

The gallery has gained from this too. Before the program began in 2000, the Serpentine — a "gallery" in name, though not in the usual American sense of the word; think of it as an art museum, or an art space more broadly — carried much less weight than it does now. It was founded in 1970 in a building put up in the 1930s, which until then had been a royal tea house.

In 1998, with Princess Diana's support, the curator and gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones, a graduate of the Royal College of Art (RCA), began a major renovation. (She stepped down in 2016, after 25 years.)

In 2000 she persuaded Zaha Hadid to build a temporary pavilion, then made the arrangement a fixture, with one rule: invitations would go only to architects or design teams that had never completed a building in Britain. A few exceptions have turned up over 18 years. (If one wants to make the rule fit, the standard Peyton-Jones first set may have been never having completed a commissioned building, whereas the official site and the common account both say never having completed a building at all — the difference being the commission.)

The effect is to put the program in a singular position at the leading edge of architecture. In nearly every case it amounts to introducing a celebrated architect to Britain for the first time; and because the brief is a pavilion, almost nothing constrains what the building has to be. The architect can play to their strengths and put their ideas on show in concentrated form.

First-rate architects, ideas in concentrated form, a British debut — the work is not going to be careless, and in practice it usually pushes for a breakthrough. With that filter working layer on layer, the standing the program and the gallery now enjoy is no surprise.

Beijing

That reputation is why the gallery's late-January announcement that "the first Serpentine Pavilion overseas" would be built in Beijing drew so much attention the moment it landed. In early February the Serpentine named the architect for the Kensington Gardens pavilion. Before that second announcement, some Chinese-language coverage ran rather "excited" — "the Serpentine Gallery makes its China debut," "in 18 years, not one Chinese architect has been invited" — and often simply set the Beijing project alongside the London pavilions of past years.

As things stand, they are two programs running in parallel.

On May 29 the Serpentine Pavilion Beijing was unveiled at WF Central in Beijing. It was designed by Liu Jiakun, whose best-known works include the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum and Chengdu's West Village · Basis Yard, also known as the Xibei Yard; we have written about that "super-courtyard".

According to the Serpentine's site, the Beijing pavilion's defining feature is its shape: a row of bows drawn but not released — curved cantilevered steel beams set in a line, each tied at the far end to a steel cable. It resembles With the Wind 2015: Your Choice (《随风 2015：由你选择》), which Liu showed at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Liu explains that the design comes from the Confucian "way of the gentleman," and that its structure expresses the spirit of overcoming hardness with softness.

"Although modern buildings in Beijing already have the technology to handle strong winds and earthquakes," the site goes on, "the pavilion's internal structure — like a tai chi master — subdues the effects of those outside forces gently."

"I am an architect. Force is what I attend to every day, and force is everywhere," Liu Jiakun told Phoenix Art. "How you treat force — resist it, yield to it, or turn it to your own ends — is not only a technical attitude but a cultural one."

Liu Jiakun counts as a leading figure in China's "critical regionalism" and "vernacular school" (not an established label — it is simply how this article groups them); the Pritzker laureate Wang Shu belongs to the same company. From the early Luyeyuan museum to the recent West Village yard, you can see China's rural traditions and local building in Liu's work.

The firm's stated principles say as much: "live in symbiosis with nature; respect history, attend to reality, learn from folk wisdom; the here and now, a realistic spirit that suits the place; committed to a contemporary architecture that carries an Eastern sensibility."

"The idea of gathering force and holding it back comes from the East... An installation like this one, drawn but not released, is an attempt to extend the boundaries of contemporary architecture," the South China Morning Post quotes Liu Jiakun as saying, before observing: "Liu's style is a world away from the gaudy, flamboyant buildings that have gone up across China in recent years to display the country's growing economy and power."

Aric Chen, lead curator of art and architecture at Hong Kong's M+ museum, made the same connection. M+ is itself impossible to ignore in Chinese contemporary art: in 2016 it showed more than 1,500 works from the Sigg collection in a survey of forty years of Chinese contemporary art, probably the most prominent exhibition on the subject before the Guggenheim show of 2017.

Chen wrote: "For the hugely successful Serpentine's first pavilion overseas, you might expect a little more flamboyance... [But] you are struck by its bold simplicity." He set Liu's approach against the dazzling tangle of steel at the Bird's Nest during the 2008 Olympics — a moment that stood for China's return to the world stage as a global power, a message that building's design distilled.

That reading has become the common one in (Western) art circles discussing the development of Chinese contemporary art in the broad sense, architecture included; Cai Guo-Qiang's Olympic fireworks are read the same way (see the 2017 Guggenheim show).

Chen puts Liu's work in the realist camp and calls it "low-tech" — Liu's own word — and work that ordinary people can connect with. In the words of the Serpentine's current director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, it "engages with the local context and connects Chinese public life with city life."

In 2008, the year the fireworks went up over the Bird's Nest, Liu Jiakun was in Wenchuan working on "Rebirth Bricks": bricks made from the rubble of the earthquake and from straw, an agricultural waste product, for survivors to rebuild with themselves.

Chen's article also makes one "astute" judgment: the Beijing pavilion marks the start of a new era in Chinese architecture.

How so? The outsized, spectacular, kaleidoscopic, "anti-gravity" buildings are not out of fashion — one glance at Beijing's big office blocks settles that — but underneath, the article argues, the focus has shifted, and methods and ideas rooted in Chinese culture now draw more of the attention. Small-scale work that leans on local materials is what Liu Jiakun, Wang Shu and others have been doing all along, and younger architects such as Zhang Lei and Zhang Ke as well. Growing cultural confidence and specific government policies for developing the countryside both encourage this work, and both have pushed it to the front.

"He is the right person at the right moment," the gallery's CEO, Yana Peel, said.

British Prime Minister Theresa May — "Auntie May" in the Chinese press — visited China early this year with a package of new UK-China cultural agreements, and, because of the Beijing pavilion, met the gallery's director Hans Ulrich Obrist and its CEO Yana Peel.

If those judgments still belong to the art world and its critics, the hand of commerce and property is plain to see.

The Beijing pavilion is a commissioned collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery and WF Central. It stands on a 6,400-square-meter green plaza on the development's west side. WF Central is the "high-end fashion and lifestyle center" that Hongkong Land spent six years building on Wangfujing shopping street; it opened for trial operations late last year. Hongkong Land is a "market leader" in luxury retail, best known in Hong Kong for The Landmark.

According to People's Daily Online and Beijing Daily, both WF Central and the pavilion's opening count as an important step in the remaking of the Wangfujing retail district: "Since last year, Wangfujing shopping street has been through a sweeping clean-up, dropping businesses that did not fit the street's positioning and improving facilities such as the pedestrian walkways... Wangfujing shopping street has set itself the goal of becoming a street with international style, Beijing character, a sense of fashion and cultural depth." Figures from business, culture and the performing arts turned out for the unveiling. The WF Central mall opened at the same time. A series of events and talks will follow inside the drawn-bow pavilion.

"Art and architecture can enrich the luxury shopping experience," said Raymond Chow, executive director of Hongkong Land.

Architecture-and-art projects bound up with commerce and property, and pushed along by other forces besides — this is not the first, and it will not be the last.

According to a video from Phoenix Art, the Serpentine plans to commission a Beijing pavilion every year from now on, as it does in London. Hans Ulrich Obrist added that the Beijing model could be exported to other cities.

The architect Ma Yansong attended events around the unveiling, and afterwards posted on Weibo as @MAD_Ma Yansong:

"With the opening of the Beijing Serpentine pavilion designed by Liu Jiakun, we gathered again for #Yuhe Night Talk# to discuss what art and architecture do to society. I think a profession has to hold on to its own value; only then can its language and its methods make clear why it exists, and even decide its own life and death — and dying, too, is for the sake of new life. Architecture should insist on individual feeling. Art and architecture that are subordinate to politics, to commerce, even to other cultures end up making the public overlook the profession's own power. We agreed: art is hope."

The London pavilion is open June 15 to October 7; the Beijing pavilion, May 30 to October 31.

Cover image / Ray Tang via The Guardian