Simplicity also means economy, which means he can get more building for the budget – the 10-metre-high pavilion is notably more voluminous than its predecessors. “I don’t have any algorithms,” says Gates.
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As a piece of plain construction, it aims to go back to first principles: “Before we had architecture, there were people who knew how to build things, to draw things.” In both cases it circumvents the architectural trickery that characterised many past pavilions. They “help us gather”, whether in the form of small cups at a social event or of a building large enough to hold many people.Īs a place of gathering, Gates wants it to be somewhere for “people to feel they are more important than the architecture”. What unifies Black Chapel with ceramics, says Gates, is that both are vessels. A programme of events – vocal and instrumental music, dance, poetry, pottery workshops – will, it is hoped, make the space reverberate. Rather, it is meant to be an “opportunity for friendship” as well as for more private “solemnity, quietude and inwardness”. The structure is not dedicated to any kind of organised faith. Such geometries are about what Gates calls “furthering something elemental”. When the sun shines, it casts circles and triangles of light and shadow. Two tall doorless openings are formed on opposite sides.
In the centre of the pavilion’s ceiling, as in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, is an unglazed oculus. A bell salvaged from a destroyed church in the South Side of Chicago, a weighty and resonant footnote to the more fragile pavilion, stands on the ground outside. Gates cites among his inspirations, as well as the kilns and silos, a kind of round church to be found in Hungary. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/ShutterstockĪlongside its homage to making, Black Chapel aims to evoke, as the name suggests, somewhere religious or spiritual. Gates’s tar paintings beneath the oculus of Black Chapel, which evokes the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. It now more nearly resembles other kinds of working structure, the silos and granaries of midwestern agriculture. Its charred tone might prompt a thought about energy: how many pavilions would have to burn to fire one of the ceramic pieces? Its early inspirations include the historical, bottle-shaped kilns of Stoke-on-Trent’s potteries, but the design has gone through some evolutions towards something more spare. It is light where the clay works are heavy. It is this year’s edition of the Serpentine’s annual pavilion, a temporary structure usually designed (but not this year) by architects.
In last week’s intermittent summer sunshine, outside the Serpentine Gallery in west London, he opened Black Chapel, a timber cylinder clad in dark roofing membrane, its interior divided by an off-centre wall into a larger and a smaller part. L ast autumn, at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, the Chicagoan artist Theaster Gates exhibited works in clay: large, heavy, wrought objects, shaped by hand, formed with intense heat and effort.
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