Serpentine Gallery

How should one make a pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery? Where should one begin? I open my eyes, and where am I? In England. In London. In Hyde Park: a typical area of the English urban space. English gardens, with the famous perfectly mown lawns, with trees and brushes here and there, casually, as if they had always been there... Suddenly, in this immense urban calm, I come across a construction, a road, a path, a small pond, a brook...One gets to wonder why such simple urban parks are so rare in other countries. An immense, free space for everyone, but what a lot of energy it takes to keep it that way, to make sure the grass is the right height, the trees are healthy and everyone feels like he is in his own city, in his own park, so naturally. It is summer, the trees are blooming, luxuriant and green. And the Serpentine and the great exhibition dedicated to Wolfgang Tillmans receive more visitors than ever. His summer pavilion is about to open, I can glimpse it, guess it, it makes the picture complete. It is explosive, a praise to summer, it carries the contrasts to the limit. It is a counterpoint to the park and the bricks of the old building of the Serpentine Gallery. It is red and temporary. Red is summer heat, it is the complementary colour of green. Red is alive, provoking, forbidden Red is English, like a rose, like a double-decker or an old telephone cabin, like the transitory places towards which we are moving. Red is not lasting, the colour will fade along with the summer, its vivacity will wane into inertia, the rose will lose its petals and the red of the sun will be the fugacious one of sunrise or twilight. Red is the colour of passion, of the fragile love that we cultivate and protect like a flame. This year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion has chosen red to celebrate summer and its blinding star: the sun.

Jean Nouvel has headed his own architectural practice since 1970. Among Mr. Nouvel’s principal completed buildings are the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Lyon Opera House, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, The Galeries Lafayette department store in Berlin, the Lucerne Culture and Congress Center, the Tours Conference Center, The Hotel in Lucerne, the Andel office building in Prague, the Nantes Justice Center, the Dentsu Tower in Tokyo, the museum of archaeology in Périgueux, the technology center in Wismar, the Agbar office tower in Barcelona, the extension to the Queen Sophia museum in Madrid, the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Brembo’s research and development centre, the Richemont Corporation headquarters in Geneva, the swimming pool of Les Bains des docks in Le Havre…Among the projects currently under study or construction at Ateliers Jean Nouvel are, an apartment building in Soho New York, the Symphonic House in Copenhagen, a office tower in Doha Qatar, a office building in the City of London, a mixed use building in Vienna, two apartment buildings in Ibiza Spain, the Theater ”Archipel” in Perpignan, an apartment building in Chelsea New York, the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Tour de Verre in New York, a condominiums tower in Los Angeles, a mixed use high-rise building in Sydney, The Tour Signal in Paris la Défense…