The Chilean architect’s strange design expresses his interests in materials, craft, and the making of architecture through eccentric means

This year’s Serpentine Pavilion (Photograph: John Stillwell/PA Wire)

It’s a bagel, or perhaps a doughnut. Or an egg shell. Maybe a UFO. Anyway it’s resting on massive rocks. Inspired, naturally, by Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant”. It’s translucent, it’ll glow in the dark. Apparently. It’s made of something like papier-mâché – you know, those balloon heads you made with the kids? But the balloon has deflated. Oh, and it was conceived as a garden folly in the English tradition. This year’s Serpentine Pavilion is not short of metaphors.

Its architect is Chilean Smiljan Radic, a relative unknown compared with his celebrity forebears on the job (Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, Herzog & De Meuron and the others). And just like Radic’s other buildings so far, it really is very odd.

The Serpentine has been challenging architects who haven’t built in the UK before to build provocative pavilions in Kensington Gardens for a decade and a half and, most of the time, they’ve been doing a pretty good job of it. The pavilion has become a quintessential part of the London summer scene, one of the rare moments when architecture is presented, unmediated, to a public who seem consistently – and increasingly – interested.

Architect Smiljan Radic (Photograph: Hisao Suzuki)

Last year’s pavilion – an ethereal assembly of white steel bars to create a diffuse grid, by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto – was a real delight, a thing that appeared so light it seemed like some kind of pixelated cloud. Radic’s attempt is something very different. The site is strewn with chunky limestone rocks quarried near Bradford (which chime delightfully with Fischli and Weiss’s striking nearby sculpture, “Rock on Top of Another Rock”) and upon these is placed a very strange object, that hollow bagel....Continue Reading

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