Culture | Exhibitions Serpentine Pavilion designs come along in cycles – if we’ve had a few years of circular parkland rotundas , an inevitable contrariness mean it’s the turn of something more freeform. So it is this year. The 23rd annual pavilion is not one object but a ring of five timber-framed volumes gathered around an empty circle where in other years a rotunda might be.
It is called ‘Archipelagic Void’ and the architects are Minsuk Cho and his practice Mass Studies – the first Korean studio to be invited to the task. The five varied structures were originally billed to house, in turn, a miniature ‘Library of Unread Books’, an auditorium, an exhibition space, a ‘play tower’, and in a nod to the Serpentine Gallery ’s original function, a teahouse. The exhibition space has, as these things have a habit of doing, shrunk, and is now simply an open-ended entrance pavilion playing a yearning soundscape commissioned from Korean musician Jang Young Gyu.
Each pavilion has its own character depending on its scale and purpose but the materials unite them – a grid of black timber with hefty uprights. The imagery is the traditional charred timber with burned bark edges often identified with Japan – Shou Sugi Ban – but here achieved in imitation dark wood stain. (There wasn’t time to create the real thing apparently.
) All are raised off the ground on concrete blocks echoing the vernacular in many countries where timber pavilions and granaries are raised.