Today I caught the rare opportunity of a sunny day off and I enjoyed Hyde Park’s perfumes and shadows.
As I walked in Kensington Gardens, close to the Serpentine Gallery, I noticed this colourful installation emerging from the green…
It’s sort of a tunnel that you can access through different entrances. The material of which it is made looks like a kind of plastic, and in some bits it reflects the light in the same way of the pearl you can find in a shell. The colors used are very strong and vivid, mainly red, yellow, green and pink. You can see inside the tunnel from outside and viceversa, so that the vision you get is permeated with different colors.
The overall impression is of playfulness, like a chaotic maze-game where you don’t win – you just enjoy.
The installation has been commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery within a program called “Serpentine Pavilion”: Since 2000, every Summer a different architect is commissioned an installation which hosts a café in the daytime and turns into a cultural space at night.
The installation that you can visit this summer was created by selgascano studio, a Spanish team founded by the architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano in 1998.
The main idea was to introduce architecture to a broader public through the basic elements of this discipline, i.e. light, shapes and colour. That is why selgascano used a florine-based polymer as the main material, in order to catch light and its variations during different time of the day.
The sensorial experience gets you into this kaleidoscopic tunnel only to make you feel thirsty when you find yourself in front of the posh café place inside it… But that’s part of the game, I guess.
Useful links:
CNN article on the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/26/travel/serpentine-pavilion-2015/index.html
Serpentine Galleries official website: http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/
Diotima in the Gallery 