8 June 2022 · By Rob Wilson

The pavilion, designed by Chicago artist and urban activist Theaster Gates, is rich in ideas and light on carbon – but light on architecture too, finds Rob Wilson

‘The guiding principle of the building was that of a vessel,’ says Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist and urban activist who designed this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, working with Adjaye Associates. Gates’ interest in vessels is literally baked into his practice, an important part of which is his work as a potter – ‘I think through vessels’ – reflecting his fascination with clay: ‘I love how it has no limits as a material,’ he says. Indeed, he had originally wanted to construct the pavilion out of brick  ‘but it proved too challenging in the timescale.’ In the event it’s constructed almost entirely of timber. ‘It’s still probably the largest vessel I’ve ever made,’ he remarks.

Certainly, this year’s pavilion, the 21st in an annual commission stretching back to 2000, has a vessel-like graphic simplicity to its form – if one you’d imagine intended for industrial storage. Seen across the green of Kensington Gardens, its punchy black cylindrical stump looks something akin to a bio-gas storage facility.

The industrial reference turns out to be an apt one given that an early inspiration for the pavilion’s shape was the brick kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, which Gates became aware of during another clay-related research project, A Question of Clay, that he worked on last year, resulting in a multi-venue exhibition at the Whitechapel, V&A and White Cube galleries.

As it developed, the pavilion’s form was simplified and refined for cost and buildability in a process that saw Gates work closely with Adjaye Associates. Gates has known David Adjaye for a decade and is working on a project with him at the National Museums Liverpool, alongside Asif Khan and Mariam Kamara.

‘It’s been a great collaboration,’ says Gates. ‘I fed David my ideas, he and his team listened and they helped with the technical specification and translated it into something that could be constructed.’

This collaboration with Adjaye Associates to technically realise the project reflects how Gates is the first artist to lead on the design of a Serpentine Pavilion project. In this, he seems a good choice. He trained as an urban planner and his practice has often engaged with architecture and building. In 2010 created the Rebuild Foundation in Chicago’s South Side, a non-profit cultural space with a mission of neighbourhood transformation through free arts programming and cultural amenities, which has seen the imaginative regeneration of several disused blocks and buildings.

It does seem though a bit of a mission drift from the original intention of the Serpentine Pavilion. Its USP has been to offer an architect who had not previously built in the UK the chance to complete a building here. In this it has always offered a rare opportunity for the work of architects to be presented as part of a wider arts programme, which this year has been reversed, with an artist dipping their toe into architecture.

The pavilion’s structure is clad in stressed-skin plywood and stained timber boards, partly rubber-clad on the exterior for weather-proofing and held on a timber and steel frame, the vertical trusses of which are exposed inside. It’s direct, pared down and readable; you get what you see on the tin.

  You enter through two tall slot-like openings into an interior lit by a central oculus in the ceiling and left open except for timber benches around its edge, running between the vertical trusses which facet the walls. A segment is divided off to one side by a single cross wall, behind which are a bar and catering facilities, a slicing of the space which has the effect of giving an orientation to the otherwise cylindrical volume.

Given the predominance of timber, this is both a relatively lightweight and a low-embodied carbon structure, even more so given that this year AECOM, the project’s engineer, developed a high-durability timber floor, used for the first time in a Serpentine Pavilion instead of concrete. This has helped minimise the necessary foundations, which consist of removable, reusable pads made from a precast low-cement-mix concrete.

Everything in the pavilion’s structure is apparently designed to be recyclable and reusable, even the exterior rubber coating, which can in theory be removed, reformed and reapplied when the pavilion is re-erected.

This reflects a concerted effort this year to really drill down and analyse the material use in the pavilion’s structure, driven no doubt by the vociferous criticism of the volume of concrete used in the foundations of last year’s pavilion. This has extended to the ethical checking and sourcing of the building materials' supply chain in respect of forced labour, with the pavilion acting as a pilot project for a new initiative in this area run by Grace Farms called Design for Freedom.

What has however resulted in a slightly hair-shirted, austerity feel, the pavilion’s structure and materials reduced to bare essentials with not much room left for sensuality of surface or texture.

But what hasn’t been scrimped on is the space and volume. The 10.7m height of the mini-pantheon-meets-gasometer main space has the loftiness and modest grandeur of scale and proportion reminiscent of a church, chiming nicely with its title of Black Chapel.

Gates describes the pavilion as an attempt to create a communal space imbued with a sense of ‘ritual and the sacred’, ascribing its circular shape to references ranging from the Kasubi tombs of Kampala, Uganda, to the round churches of Hungary.

‘It’s about creating a space in which there can sometimes be a sense of individual quietude but at others that sense of ecstasy that’s experienced communally in space, of the sort felt in a chapel or a club,’ he says. ‘It’s not just black in colour. It’s also about Blackness – and about the potency to change things around us and to remain optimistic.’

The space will also see a programme of events, in particular music, with experimental musical performances, ‘sonic interventions’ and creative participatory workshops that include, fittingly, ones for pottery making. Continuing the sonic theme and linking back to his work in Chicago, a bronze bell at one entrance, salvaged from the demolished St Laurence Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side, will be rung as ‘a call for congregation’ at the beginning of each event.

As well as the communal, there is also a personal dimension to Gates’ thinking about the design of the pavilion, which he describes as in part a memorial to his father, a roofer whom Gates at times helped with his work. He has since created a series of ‘tar paintings’ that use the techniques and materials of his father’s trade.

‘Lots of origin stories start with parents,’ he says. ‘There was nothing pretty about roofing. It was work by a Black man who had a third-rate education – labour was all he had to offer. But my history and my practice of making has its origins in his, in his making and working through of problems, in his case the solving of roofing problems.

‘The original idea for the pavilion was that it would have been all roof, its entire roof as a painting.’ As it is there are seven of his tar paintings hanging in the space like an extended altar piece, with their textured surfaces, luminously capturing the light from the oculus above. It makes you rue the fact that Gates was not able to cover the exterior with such a richness of material and texture.

It again underlines how it feels like the need to simplify construction and minimise the carbon footprint of the building appears to have rather clipped the wings of Gates’ deep engagement with the properties of materials in his practice.

If judged in terms of Gates’ concept of a vessel, this year’s pavilion undoubtedly has a directness and physical power to it as a volume, with the blackness of its interior surfaces lending it an unexpected cocoon-like warmth. But as architecture, it’s not complex or subtle in the forms or spaces it makes – seemingly reflective of how increasingly this annual architecture commission appears to elicit structures designed more to act as empty staging for events rather than being the main event in themselves.

Tags Adjaye Associates Serpentine Pavilion Theaster Gates

One thing about items made from clay is often how creatively they are decorated, and how colourful and richly illustrated they are. I cannot understand the choice of dark grey/tar colour? Looking at the photographs above, the only thing which uplifts them is the colours of the visitors clothes. I do not think industrial/funerial is an appropriate reference for the serpentine pavilion, especially this summer.

What a stunningly beautiful pavilion: simple, elegant, and reflective in form, materials, detail, and colour. I would like to see the plans in relation to its context (the plans of the Serpentine). I would like also to see photographs of it on a grey London day.

I am gonna have to go visit, it might be an amazing space with acoustic qualities and temperature differences making it really good. But, visually, judging from the pictures, it has an appeal of a bomb shelter.

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