Fleeting Pleasures: temporary structures by Carmody Groarke and Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Studio East Dining (ph: Luke Hayes).

Giles Reid samples a selection of summer pavilions whose lease hath all too short a date.
I arrive at Stratford International early on a Sunday morning, the only person on a vast new platform. The temperature is already approaching 30 degrees. Above looms the stupendously large Westfield shopping centre and somewhere beyond is the Olympic site. Construction expands for miles like some the product of some overheated Spanish building boom, which in a sense is exactly what the Olympics is. For the last couple of years it’s been virtually the only building game in town. There are something like 40 tower cranes for the athlete’s village alone, maybe more. Everything that once was here has been erased. Everything is new, though currently covered in dust.
Cleared by security, I’m escorted via a protected route up to the top floor of a new car park, where I emerge onto the roof. Ahead lies Carmody Groarke’s Studio East Dining, a three-week-only pop-up restaurant run by East London restaurateurs Bistrotheque. It is a giant starburst form, white and abstract. Walls and roofs are both made of the same white material. On closer viewing, the reality is somewhat messier. The skin is made of PVC which is heated and shrink-wrapped. Where the PVC has melted or torn, it is simply patch-repaired.
I enter down a tapering tunnel. Beyond, the restaurant explodes into view. The first impression is of the wind and noise. The room consists of numerous wings, each open to the elements beyond. The space is formed by a scaffold frame. Floor and walls are lined with scaffold boards. The PVC outer wrapping produces a soft top-light. The faint mauve of tethered plastic dust drapes frames each vista of the Olympic site beyond. Each wing has its own privileged view, though none is specifically focused on any particular structure.

The plan is strongly related to Alvaro Siza’s Summer House in Sintra (2007). The layout at first appears quite random, but breaks down into a simple binary division of served and servant wings. Toilets, kitchen and generators are housed in prefabricated pods craned onto the roof. The reception bar takes up three wings. The restaurant consists of four converging wings, each with its own large table, again made of scaffold boards, but with edges planed. People eat in a communal style to a set menu. White Robin Day Polo chairs line the tables. Crockery and glassware is plain but refined. Builders’ safety lights are slung over the walls or, in one case, gathered up above as an updated version of Rody Grauman’s classic 85 Lamps chandelier for Droog (1992).

Studio East Dining (ph: Luke Hayes).

The architect’s computer renderings gave the space and structure an ethereal, fragile feel. The reality is more immediate, less designed. The build proceeded at tremendous speed and with obvious assurance. From concept to completion apparently took ten weeks. The traditional process of concept leading to development and then engineering to building has been replaced by idea then execution. The structure has effectively been worked out by the scaffolding crew. The pavilion is literally a piece of theatre. The project as a whole – not just the build but the notion of a pop-up restaurant itself – is very much in the spirit of Dutch ‘Dry’ design. It is conceptual, improvised, at times ironic and meant as a provocation to a sophisticated, art-appreciative audience.
The trailblazer in whose path Studio East Dining follows is obviously the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavilion in Hyde Park. This year’s pavilion – the tenth in the series – is designed by French giant Jean Nouvel. The production of images has always been central to his practice. Despite being a prolific builder, an even larger part of Nouvel’s portfolio consists of unexecuted projects. On the one time I visited the office, it felt like a three-deck submarine in which daylight-deprived students worked feverishly on CGIs. The practice is a dominant influence on the style of French architecture schools, a sort of retro-futurism in which gravity loses its hold on building, edges blur and everyone over the age of 30 is surgically removed by Photoshop.

CGI: Ateliers jean Nouvel

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Despite this tradition, the renderings for the Serpentine pavilion are not among Nouvel’s best. Being completely coloured in Nouvel’s trademark red suggested a predictable response to what should be a unique commission. If the stated purpose of the Serpentine is to expose Londoners to international architects who have yet to build in this country, this is surely subverted by commissioning a late career architect whose sizeable One New Change is nearing completion behind St Paul’s. But then again, commissioning Frank Gehry in 2008 relied on drawing the distinction that his Maggie’s Centre (2003) was in Scotland rather than England.
Coming straight after Sanaa’s magically ethereal pavilion last year, the prominent blade wall in the images seemed to augur a return to the monumentality of Gehry’s effort. At one level, it’s so overwhelmingly about the colour red that it’s hard if not impossible to see beyond it. Colour does not appear a particularly deep idea, if it can be considered an idea. Yet unlike virtually every other Serpentine pavilion before, Nouvel’s is set up to work as a proper outdoor cafeteria. And what the CGIs did not capture is that it’s not the red, but the pairing of red with green that sets the space vibrating. Which is red, the light through the awning or the material itself? The effect is to look at the real world through 3D glasses, except the lens is positioned yards away from the retina. Nouvel deploys every trick in his lexicon to exaggerate the effects of saturation – red poured-in-place rubber flooring and reflecting mirrors, red curtains, glossy lacquers and furniture, red transparent films applied to glass, cut in two by a searing green line.

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Serpentine Gallery 2010 plan

The knowingness is made evident when the architect cuts out the word ‘green’ from the red film, through which you can glimpse the park beyond. You could look at this multiplication through the theoretical prism of say Jacques Lacan or Josep Quetglas – Nouvel himself places an photograph of the Jardin du Luxembourg by Jean Baudrillard on one pane and at the launch said something obligatory about 1968 – but the more immediate response is to react as a child in a toy shop and surrender to it. And why not: it’s a pavilion, not a manifesto.
The verve and style with which it is carried out overwhelms the senses and perhaps flattens critical judgement too; arguably that’s what simulacrum does. Absolutely everything is coloured different shades of red. Red aluminium chairs sponsored by Coca-Cola and fridges supplied by Smeg suggest an easy Pop relationship with commercialism. Red spotlights and mechanical awnings connote a matter-of-fact interplay of nature and technology. It’s only when you look closer that you think about the fact that awning motors aren’t commonly available in red. Every component must have been disassembled, sprayed and reassembled. It’s all slightly mad.

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Photo: Philippe Ruault

Furniture is arranged in bands, each defined by a large-span steel beam from which the red awnings deploy, one canopy just overlapping the next. Under the lowest fixed canopy is the chess area (black squares turned green) bordered by red and green planting. Under the next canopy is lounge seating, then comes eating, then more chairs and spreading out into the park are loungers and ping-pong tables – red bats, red table (white balls though).
At the launch, everyone looks happy and beautiful. Surfer types with aviator glasses recline on inflatables. Model types drift through this surreal landscape conversing in French. Has the event really been stage-managed to this degree? I feel as if I have dropped into a CGI. As Baudrillard famously wrote: ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’
Giles Reid is an architect and London representative of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. He has written for Monument and Domus, among other publications.

Hy-Pavilion (ph: Tim Lucas).

Hy-Pavilion
The Hy-Pavilion was installed at two different locations during the course of the London Festival of Architecture in June and July. The structure was conceived by Price & Myers partner Tim Lucas. ‘I wanted to create a pavilion for the festival that was made out of a very basic element – a straight line – put together in an interesting way so that it could be elegant and exciting but simple to make and build,’ he explains.
The structure is made of lengths of black cord and timber edge beams arranged in the shape of two intersecting hyperbolic paraboloids, from which the pavilion derives its name. Though apparently complex, the forms of the pavilion are entirely made up of straight lines which reveal parabolic curves when viewed from
an angle.
The structure is self-supporting.  The two hyperbolic paraboloids at right angles to each other create a stable frame of rigid triangles made of eight strong engineered timber beams. The beams taper down in size towards their tips as the bending moments they carry diminish. A canvas canopy is stretched between the beams to provide shelter and, together with the cables, this pre-stresses and stabilises the structure. The beams are linked together in the middle and at their tips like four pairs of scissors. The joints form a mechanism that lifts the structure up when the corners are pulled together. This means that the three-storey-high structure can be put up without any need for cranes or scaffolding.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion project team
Architect: Ateliers Jean Nouvel; design team: Jean Nouvel, Gaston Tolila, Ute Rinnebach, Driss Benabdallah, Sophie Laromiguiere; visualisation: Raphael Renard, Vatsana Takham; landscape: Isabelle Auricoste-Tonka; engineering: Arup; client: Julia Peyton-Jones with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Gallery; project & construction management: MACE; awnings: AEL; glass: Eckelt Glas; screw pile foundations: GTL Partnership; curtains: Kvadrat; lighting: WE-EF.
Studio East Dining project team
Architect: Carmody Groarke: design team: Kevin Carmody, Andy Groarke; client: Westfield Stratford City; client initiative: Studio East; restaurateur: Bistrotheque; main contractor: Benchmark Scaffolding; services contractor: Imtech Meica; cladding contractor: SCA; decoration: E Poole; kitchen units: PKL.
Hy-pavilion project team
Designer, engineer: Price & Myers; engineered timber: Finnforest; stainless steel fabrication: m-tec; fabric: Millimetre; contractor: Commercial Systems International.
First published in AT210, July/August 2010
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