Review: Ai Weiwei’s London underground

The Serpentine Pavilion by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei has an elevated conceptual idea behind it. The cork-lined landscape, dug down into the ground, is intended to be an archaeological excavation: its dense network of benches, ramps and steps correspond to lines and vectors from the 11 previous Serpentine Pavilions that occupied this spot.

However, the striking thing about it is that it really feels like a great place to hang out. It has the quality of those accidental landscapes that children love to spend time in: rock pools or a landscape of tree hollows. Cork covers every surface: you smell it from yards away, and the dust coats your clothes. It’s a beautiful material made into a monolithic surface that looks like solid stone. But of course it is soft and welcoming, making the pavilion an easy place to sit or lean.

A disc-like roof, filled with water, covers and shades the cork world below, creating what Jacques Herzog described to me as a “mirror of London’s sky”. Certainly the pavilion thematically tries to find a territory poised between earth and sky, and in doing so avoids the trap of creating just another fancy shape. It is an informal, fun place that also reaches for a new territory for architectural practice: between the discovered and the imaginary.