200words: serpentine pavilion 2014

"And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split." Mt27v51

A Turin Shroud draped about a torus, riddle me that, we are amongst a many metaphored folly this year. Radić’s aged ageless hessian frays, it is all ever-so textured, layered glazed over knowingly, and labouriously authentic.

The meme of ‘made’ things makes a fetish of the crude and unfinished, and here our druid leads us in a frenzied fervour for the tactile. The elemental thrownness of the rocks demands them to be touched. They are very there, gesturally scattered detritus from the explosive force of metamorphosis, left remnant as the butterfly flew forth.

A similar glorious savage mind’s naïveté pervades the forted playpen within, as the sun warmed papier-mâché paints the interior a Soanian ochre. I regress to clammy canvas camping on my grandparent’s lawn, I am fairytaled, I am Where the Wild Things Are.

It is a heavily engineered hovering however, stalk metal legs gangle as gang planks akimbo ushering the good and the gullible to another faux excavation. The same charming ruse utilising an accentuated narrative of accretion and subtraction from a whole is one that sustained Fujimoto’s and Herzog&deMeuron’s forms previously. The ossified process of production is key to the currency of the contemporary folly - the hint of a happening, a glimpse into that moment at which architecture ruptured contiguity.


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