Serpentine Neoliberalism
On June 7th the 24th annual Serpentine Pavilion opened in London’s Kensington Gardens, designed by South Korean architect Minsuk Cho and his practice, Mass Studies. The pavilion’s press release claims reference to traditional Korean architecture and describes the discreet elements of the building as “content machine(s)”, providing something of a gesamtkunstwerk of architecture and sound installation. It of course also provides the generic given requirements of “…area for public gathering, performances and talks to take place.”
Like most Serpentine Pavilions, this one is unsurprisingly shite. While professional criticisms of these architectures are often veiled with diplomatic manners, with constructive critique, democratic opinion tends to render these buildings as fundamentally forgettable, as architectural muzak. When a good or great architect makes a Serpentine Pavilion, one can likely assume it to be the most undergraduate, boring and simply bad thing they’ve ever done or will do under public eyes, with few exceptions so far.
The annoying thing about this is that the assumed aim of the pavilion series – to make an ongoing argument for architecture’s artistic value to the mass public of the 21st century – is a fundamentally honorable and worthwhile one. Architecture has at many times historically been a “mass art” without kitchness, without losing its profundity to cultural-industrial logics of sameness and consumption, nor to pure didacticism over complex aesthetic experience.
Why then is it worth even thinking about the Serpentine Pavilions?
Firstly, the general failure of this series tracks the convulsions of 21st century neoliberalism and the End of History as reflected in culture. When the pavilions fail to tell us of the potential of architecture, they tell us inversely of the value of reductively instructional, branding-based, message-over-medium culture as a ledger of history. Secondly, the failure of this series does still manage to raise important questions for the relations between political economy and art.
The Serpentine Pavilions have been curated for the past near-quarter century by the broader Serpentine Galleries director and globally recognised curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. As with several other annual art and architecture awards – the international Pritzker Architecture Prize and the British Turner Prize for contemporary art, for instance – the politics of commission for the Serpentine Pavilions reflects an ideological processing of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, as a synecdoche for the general and ongoing crisis of the early 21st century.
The first architect commissioned for the series in 2000 was Zaha Hadid, one of, if not the most famed architects of the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan world. Zaha’s pavilion, like Daniel Liebeskind’s the following year, was a severely underwhelming work of formalism. In addition to Hadid and Liebeskind, the following commissions of the 2000s went exclusively to “starchitects”/“star-architects”, often those associated with the Robert Hughes-attributed label, “Bilbao Effect”: Toyo Ito in 2002, Oscar Niemeyer in 2003, Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura in 2005, Rem Koolhaas in 2006, Olafur Eliasson in 2007, Frank Gehry in 2008, SANAA in 2009, and Jean Nouvel in 2010.
Referring to Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the term described the phenomena of architectural spectacles commissioned in following years, commissions which sought the same tourist boost which the city of Bilbao experienced; an architecturalisation of trickle-down economics (Peter Eisenman’s ‘The City of Culture of Galicia’ would prove to be, for the Bilbao Effect, what the Pruitt-Igoe towers were claimed to be for modernism). A number of these architects would be later re-categorised in relation to neoliberalism in Douglas Spencer’s 2016 book, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance. Many of these architects were also awarded the Pritzker Prize during or close-to the 2000s: Rem Koolhaas in 2000, Zaha Hadid in 2004, Jean Nouvel in 2008, Souto de Moura in 2011, Frank Gehry in 1989, Oscar Niemeyer in 1988.
Parallel to this culture of 1980s-2000s star-architecture, the British art world saw the Turner Prize-canonisation of artists, labelled often as Young British Artists (YBAs) associated also with opulence and an “entrepreneurial attitude” inherited from Americans Warhol and Koons, the most obvious case of this being the 1995 Turner Prize winner Damien Hirst. Architecture, slow as always, was perhaps in the form of the Serpentine Pavilions, a 2000s-era hangover from the British artworld of the 1990s, a world unshadowed by The War on Terror and the threat of history’s return.
These tendencies in architecture and art now read partly as reflections of late 20th century Fukuyamaist jubilation, of upbeat post-political Blairism and Clintonite saxophone rhapsodies. Artists and architects wanted to be stars. They wanted their culture to be entertainment, and entertainment was its own message.
The current Serpentine Pavilion by Minsuk Cho reveals a post-GFC pivot away from the would-be spectacles of the 2000s towards the “capitalism with a human face” mask that Slavoj Žižek applies to liberal billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates. The post-GFC pavilions sought a turn away from the amoralism of pre-crash star-architecture, towards a new era of humanistic, PMC, socially conscious architecture, sponsored by Goldman Sachs since 2015.
The “post”-star-architects commissioned in the 2010s and 2020s, as with this year’s choice, often come from outside a narrowly defined West, with their culture of origin often featured in the work auto-referentially. Many architects selected are relatively obscure (within obvious limits), compared at least to the pre-GFC commissions, implying a sense of American Idol-esque zero-to-hero meritocracy, revealing of course, the political and economic complexities of “merit” which have led to the concept’s recent crises.
Prior to Minsuk Cho, Lina Ghotmeh’s 2023 pavilion was about environmental sustainability. Theaster Gates’ 2022 pavilion referenced, “the sacred forms of Hungarian round churches and the ring shouts, voodoo circles and roda de capoeira witnessed in the sacred practices of the African diaspora” (collaborator David Adjaye, who was also previously involved in the commissioning of Serpentine Pavilion architects, has since been cancelled over sexual harassment allegations). Sumayya Vally’s 2021 pavilion was about “informal communities”. Junya Ishigami’s 2019 pavilion referenced “traditional architecture” in a more free-for-all Heideggerian sense. Frida Escobedo’s (unusually interesting) 2018 pavilion referenced Mexican domestic architecture. Diébédo Francis Kéré’s 2017 pavilion responded to climatic and environmental themes. The 2016 pavilion by Bjarke Ingels, the gelled-hair Albert Speer of eco-capitalism (or “hedonistic sustainability” in his words), was, in being bad, better than what he normally does.
Bjarke Ingels, in particular among this cohort, represents a shift from the Steve Jobs-incarnate architect of the pre-GFC, to the Bill Gates-incarnate of the post-GFC. The former (Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas for instance) were or are still described as either headstrong or arrogant depending on one’s sensibilities. The later (Bjarke Ingels, Thomas Heatherwick, and Alejandro Aravena for instance) might be described as either humanitarian world-changers or as Patrick Bateman-styled, janus faced grifters.
Starchitecture rebranded as TED Talkitecture.
This post-GFC shift can be read too in Pritzker Prize winners (Aravena and Kéré as mentioned) and in message-driven Turner Prize winners (Assemble in 2015, and the collective win of multiple artists in 2019, for example).
If the pre-GFC Serpentine Pavilions represented End of Historical euphoria, the post-GFC Serpentine Pavilions represent ideological recalibration and self-consciousness, phenomena which, in their most acerbic form, obviously still play out in the 2010s-onwards culture wars.
In the future, one might learn a surprising amount about the early 21st century as a whole by reading the Serpentine Pavilion press releases. This would not include learning about great architecture.
While the pre- and post-GFC pavilions reflect significant ideological and cultural shifts, our expected disappointment with them reflects a persistent condition and problem: the standardised slot-machine conveyor-belt production of architecture through an annual procession of construction and demolition. Aside from the environmental implications of this process – for which the environmentally-focused pavilions have of course received hostilities – this subjugation of architecture, a remarkably slow thing, to the economic rhythms of a music festival, reflects a broader problem of conforming art to financial and technological systems of time to which their creative production and experience is simply not suited. Architecture, at its fastest, is still fucking slow. We will never 3D-print McModernist mass housing of any quality or endurance without deep thought and rigor, nor will architectural fast-food prove adept at crafting profound experience.
I don’t blame Hans-Ulrich Obrist, nor any of the pavilion architects themselves, nor Goldman Sachs alone, beneath the weight of history, for making such shite buildings. Under these conveyor-belt conditions, architecture can perform little more than ideological decoration.
Art (architecture included) requires time, for its making, for its contemplation, for an experience of time-itself other than that which Walter Benjamin referred to as “homogenous empty time”, a logic now intensified by scrolling, by the social mediatisation of all experience, exactly the genre of experience which the Serpentine Pavilions are forced to produce, and in their success of this, they leave us entirely empty and forgetful.
I don’t believe art itself to be a vehicle for significant political transformation, but its place in society can I’d argue serve as a barometric measure for politics, for the question of what society makes art? This question can be read in two ways simultaneously: what type of society makes art, and what does society do to art? What contemporary society would actually produce architectural experiences for its public, which the Serpentine Pavilions are asked to provide under impossible circumstances?
The question of how an experience of time independent from marketized, bureaucratized, technologized logics is a question which links politics, to the everyday, to art.