The new Serpentine Pavilion

I’m excited about the Serpentine Pavilion this year as it’s by one of my favourite architects, Jean Nouvel. His work isn’t always beautiful, but it’s always thought provoking, and this looks like no exception.

Glowing red in Nouvel's Copenhagen concert hall gives you an idea of his way with colours

Every year, the Serpentine Gallery builds a new pavilion in Hyde Park. It’s temporary architecture, but it’s high profile – previous designers have included Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Oscar Niemeyer. This year the Serpentine chose Jean Nouvel, the French architect who’s currently working on a national museum for Qatar, and a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. (There’s still money for big projects in the Gulf – many of his projects in the West, such as his Tour Signal in La Defence, have been put on hold as property developers have run out of funds.)

Nouvel has created a flaming red geometry – a vivid contrast to the green of the park around it. A dramatic inclined wall looms over the horizontal rectangles of the pavilion itself – but what looks from outside like a couple of simple boxes is revealed from the inside to be a succession of sliding, sloping awnings. Cantilevered metal is engineered to give a tough, hard feeling to the architecture, but the soft polycarbonate and fabric coverings soften it and undercut its masculinity.

And that flaming red! It’s the red of blood, of ruin, of destruction. The red of Promethean fire. Glowing red, with the light shining through it, when you’re inside. Glowering red, dull and malignant, when you’re outside.

Red is not for buildings. We like our buildings grey, or white, or creamy stone coloured, and even when they’re in brick, we prefer a browner, or yellower, brick, not poster-paint red. Red is for fire engines, for telephone boxes and post boxes, for guardsmen’s uniforms and VIPs’ red carpets.

So Nouvel’s use of red is what? a warning? an exclamation mark? a revolutionary statement? a reference, perhaps, to nature, so that the inside of the pavilion becomes, as it were, the innards of a physical being, red with blood? The great thing is that he hasn’t given us any clue as to what he’s saying with the colour – and yet instantly you perceive that it’s something different from normal, that it’s meaningful and strange.

There’s even an element of playfulness – Nouvel has included outdoors table-tennis tables, a traditional French element of summer.  So perhaps we needn’t take the red too much to heart – it’s the post-box red of a van bringing a delivery, the bright red of a water-pistol or a child’s toy.

The pavilion opens on the 10th July, and will be open till 17th October, every day. There’s a programme of talks and events in the pavilion, including a talk by the architect next week – see the Serpentine Gallery web site for more information.

Photo by Seier + Seier on flickr