Architecture this week

05/06/26

The big news this week is probably the unveiling of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, the first brick pavilion in the history of this summer exhibition of architecture. Designed by Mexican studio Lanza Atelier it uses the garden wall - but built in the crinkle-crankle style (particular to rural Suffolk, but interestingly also Mexico), which is self supporting single brick wall that requires no additional buttressing. The bricks have no mortar instead being threaded onto rods so it is easy for disassembly at the end of the summer.

It has received slightly mixed reviews. The Guardian cautiously approves noting that

“As the archetypal building block, used for millennia, but still fitting into a human hand, it seems only right that after 25 years, brick’s Serpentine time has finally come.”

The Times is less keen with Eddy Frankle noting in a review called ‘two brick walls and a lot of blather’ that:

But, wow, is it imposing and stark. The blurb talks about how these walls are “permeable” and no longer “opaque” (architecture spiel is somehow even more full of unbearable nonsense than art spiel), but as you approach through the park it is a dominant, looming and ultimately exclusionary structure.

I think it looks fun though and look forward to visiting - i’ve always loved a crinkle-crankle wall.

In some shameless self promotion I will move on to news that the I was featured on Kevin McCloud’s Listed Britain on More4 this week (episode 4 on catch up) where I spoke on the difficulties we had sourcing materials for conservation work on the Royal Festival Hall. They also used a clip of my rhapsodising about the banisters, something I apparently do quite frequently because as it started my partner moaned ‘not those bloody banisters again’… what can I say- they’re so much better than the Part M compliant 40mm circle!

A few weeks ago I advertised the international competition to design concepts for a modern-day Crystal Palace, and the winners have just been announced. I must admit to being slightly disappointed. They are beautiful drawings by clearly talented people - but where the original Crystal Palace was a celebration of the potential of a new era of technology and ingenuity these designs have a slightly dystopian feel with titles like ‘the unfixed palace’ and ‘After the Palace: A Necropolis of Return’- I will quote BD at length here:

The Unfixed Palace by Edward Norman is not a building at all, but a field of mist suspended above the footprint of where the palace stood at Crystal Palace Park before it burned down in 1936.

…

UK Grand Crystal Palace by Jenchieh Hung + Kulthida Songkittipakdee / HAS design and research is a continuous mass timber ring stretching for 1.8 miles around Crystal Palace Park, encircling 210 acres of restored native British habitat.

The proposal aims to redefine architecture not as a monument to human progress but as a living ecosystem in which plants and animals are equal participants.

After the Palace: A Necropolis of Return by Dr Harriet Harriss, Naomi House and Heidi Lu is conceived as a giant sarcophagus built from salvaged rubble, composted textiles and contaminated soil which is designed to slowly decompose, transforming into fertile soil over the course of the exhibition period.

A Simulated Future Civic Framework by Daniel van der Poll envisages a repeatable series of modular structures radiating from the original Crystal Palace footprint, with a huge main building at its centre composed of giant arched forms of glass and steel.

The majority of the winners seem to speak less to a confidence that current technology could improve our lives and more to a slight embarrassment that humanity should ever have had the temerity to build things in the first place. Probably very ethical, certainly more conscious of environment… but to my mind not very cheering or aspirational for an ideas contest.

This week Manchester pops up again as the Architects’ Journal mirrors the national eyes on the city with an article on young architects choosing to move to Manchester over London. In the words of architect Emily Percival:

‘It feels more dynamic, young, exciting and less predictable here. It’s not as obvious to go to London anymore,’ says Percival, who switched to Manchester specifically because she saw the city offering more of the kind of projects that excited her.

The AJ also reports some rather sad news that practice Bennetts Associates (of whose work I have always been a fan) has reported a £1.3m loss in the last financial year exacerbated by the economic slowdown and the number of projects currently on pause. We can all relate to some extent. Also reported is the fact that someone at Heatherwick Studio didn’t fully check a visual that one suspects had something to do with AI putting the London BT tower into the Birmingham skyline a visual of their new stadium concept for Birmingham FC.

I will finish by recommending a rather lovely opinion piece by Nat Barker in Dezeen on the rising popularity of what he calls ‘gentleism’ as an architectural style - he quotes Niall McLaughlin articulating the approach ‘remarkably neatly’

"It's not a dialogue of subservience," he said. "It's a conversation with peers. You put your building beside theirs and hope that the two of them will glow together, and you hope that somebody in the future will come and do the same for you. It's that sense of a kind of continuity of performance across time, much more so than this idea of the unique bauble, or the unique shiny artefact."

If you happen to be in London next week can I also recommend an event due to take place at Temple Bar on Tuesday evening, where four early career architects will discuss their early experience of the profession and some of the change they hope to see in years to come - tickets available here.