Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic I did what any journalist would do before meeting Minsuk Cho, architect of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London: I clicked on his firm’s website. My laptop suggested the site was not secure. It was also, I ought to add, completely useless and looked like something from the days when an image would take 30 seconds to load. Yet Min, as he likes to be known, is among the most successful, admired and unpredictable architects in his native South Korea, a nation at the vanguard of tech, its capital Seoul saturated in vivid LEDs and the sheen of high-tech newness. I mention the dated website when we meet, and admit that, in fairness, I still use Hotmail. “Ah!” he says. “Me too. And my website is still in Flash, so it doesn’t do too well on phones.”Perhaps it’s a generational thing — Min was born in 1966 — but it might also be an attitude, another feature of an unpredictable nature that means you’re never quite sure what kind of building will come next.We are speaking beneath the billowing white fabric roof of Zaha Hadid’s Magazine restaurant at the Serpentine North Gallery, in the Kensington Gardens site. It was Hadid, of course, who kicked off the annual Serpentine pavilion programme with a faceted and folded white canopy that looked almost unimaginably cool in 2000, but now appears rather simple. The pavilions, which are constructed and dismantled each year, have since then mapped out this new century, bringing architects who have not built in the UK before (incredibly, its was Hadid’s first British building), exposing architecture to a willing public as a thing of pleasure and indulgence rather than, necessarily, gravity.The programme has been hugely successful and that success has inspired dozens of similar initiatives across the globe, the adoption of architecture as an experiment and a folly with no long-term commitment.Min follows everyone from Oscar Niemeyer to Rem Koolhaas — he worked for the latter at OMA in the Netherlands, after a stint in New York where he established a studio called Cho Slade in 1998. Five years later, he returned to Korea to open his own firm, Mass Studies. But at the Serpentine he also comes after a spate of lesser-known, younger designers. In a way, he represents a return to the pavilion’s starchitect beginnings: he is a successful designer with a clutch of awards and nominations to his name, though not that well known outside South Korea. And his pavilion is, at least figuratively, a bit of a star. “The pavilion is a utopian idea,” he tells me in slightly American-tinged English. “In Europe in the early 20th century we had domes — Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion [1914, at the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne], then Buckminster Fuller [pioneer of the geodesic dome] and the hippies at Drop City [a 1960s counterculture community in Colorado]. When we were invited to design this at the Serpentine, we looked back at all the 22 pavilions before us,” he says. “We found there had been eight circles, four rectangles and the rest some kind of free-form. We have built dozens of pavilions in every possible assemblage of forms. So we thought: what if we leave the centre empty, with a circular void?”And that is what they have done. Its formal name is the slightly pretentious “Archipelagic Void”, but the expression is joyful. “It’s like a Korean meal,” he grins. “You know, you go to a French restaurant and they bring you all these many courses over a long period. In Korea, everything happens at once. It’s a collective experience, but you choose your own foods — something cold, something spicy, something sweet . . . ” The feast here is a sprawl, five arms or tentacles spinning off in all directions, each housing its own activities: one with a playground, one a library, another a teahouse. “It’s difficult to describe,” Min says, “because it will be about the senses as well, about the smell of the wood, which is not processed timber but logs cut in the countryside, and the sounds, the feel, about playing. We have a tactile relationship to architecture in Korea. We take our shoes off to enter a house, we caress materials. This is not a building to just take a photo of, but something to be stepped on, touched, climbed over . . . ”It looks like an eclectic mix of his characteristic super-urban forms and ongoing interest in the vernacular. “The void is partly inspired by the ‘madang’,” he says, “the courtyard at the centre of the traditional Korean house. That’s a space for everyday activity, but also for communal ritual.”This central hole gives the pavilion the feel of a centrifuge, with activity flung off in all directions, but exuding an odd calm at its heart, a still space with a view of the sky above. It is also a significantly chunky thing, heavily engineered. There is little of the lightness of Hadid’s tent here, or of last year’s lacy teahouse design by the Lebanese-born architect Lina Ghotmeh. This is something fragmented, dispersed, yet still, paradoxically perhaps, more substantial. Each tentacle has its own architectural expression, its own particular form of roof, some swooping to a high point, others flat, illuminated by coloured acrylic or strung with orange netting. “There is no prescribed sequence at the pavilion,” Min says. “People are free to compose their own experiences.”With Mass Studies, Min has broad experience designing cultural spaces in landscapes. There is, for instance, the remarkable Space K in Seoul, a swirling concrete structure with an inhabited roof, which is in a park they also designed. An engaging museum of contemporary art, it is itself a kind of pavilion to activate a corporate landscape. Then there is the Osulloc Tea Museum on South Korea’s glorious Jeju Island, a series of architectural interventions of exquisite lightness set in the lush landscape of a working tea farm.The new Serpentine Pavilion, a thing of a very different scale, has been heavily programmed, much of it featuring Korean artists building on the recent success of Korean culture in the west, which includes everything from K-pop and movies to kimchi and Samsung. There is also what he calls “a moment of stillness”, the “library of unread books”. People will be encouraged to bring a book they have bought or been given but somehow never managed to read. I ask him whether he has donated. “Oh yes,” he says. “Violence by Slavoj Žižek and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.” (“I saw the movie,” he says, “and that seemed like enough.”)How does he feel, then, about following all these great names in the Serpentine series? He grins broadly and says, “It’s like the James Bond franchise. Each director and each actor brings their own approach. What if it were an unknown Asian director? Of course it is a bit intimidating, but I hope it’s not antagonistic — rather, a balancing act.”June 7-October 27, serpentinegalleries.org
