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This year’s Serpentine Pavilion from Chilean architect Smiljan Radić looks somewhat like a papier mâché spaceship. We investigate the rationale behind his design

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Words Cate St Hill, Photography Johnny Tucker

Smiljan Radic was an unusual choice as he was little known outside of his native Chile

If you didn't know that the Serpentine Gallery had been creating a temporary pavilion on its front lawn for the past 14 years, you could be forgiven for thinking that an alien flying saucer had just landed in Kensington Gardens. Perched on a Druid-like formation of large boulders, this year's iteration looks like a hollowed- out snail shell patched together with masking tape, halfway between a home for the Flintstones and a galactic vessel ready to take off. It is the work of the largely unknown Chilean architect Smiljan Radic, who follows in the wake of household names such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry.

Radic's sketches show how he was inspired by natural forms

At 48 years old Radic is one of the youngest architects to have been chosen to design a Serpentine pavilion. His work has mainly been confined to his native Chile, having founded his practice in Santiago in 1995. It could be argued that it was a brave decision for the Serpentine Gallery to pick him - a young architect barely heard of outside of South America - but it is a welcome direction for the institution, leading on from Sou Fujimoto's (who was 41 at the time) thoughtful and hugely successful cloud-like structure last year. In a similar way to Fujimoto, Radic is more interested in creating an atmospheric space or a climatic situation rather than a purely beautiful object. 'We have been intrigued by his work ever since our first encounter with him at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010,' say the Serpentine Gallery's co-directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. 'Radic is a key protagonist of an amazing architectural explosion in Chile. While enigmatically archaic, in the tradition of romantic follies, Radic's designs for the Pavilion also look excitingly futuristic, appearing like an alien space pod that has come to rest on a Neolithic site.' At the opening of the pavilion in June, Radic told journalists, 'This commission is so special for me because in the end this piece of grass is a symbolic place for London, it's a big challenge. I had never been in a [Serpentine] pavilion before, I had only seen them in pictures. It gave me more freedom but in the end the pavilion has to be yours, and that is the problem. The problem is not the other ones.'

With the press conference in full swing (l-r) Hans Ulrich Obrsist, Julia Peyton-Jones and Smiljan Radic sit outside and face the media within

From the outside, visitors see a creamy shell made of fibreglass, mounted on large quarry stones that appear as if they have been plonked down by Stonehenge's descendants. The result is vaguely reminiscent of Fischli/Weiss's Rock on Top of Another Rock, comprising two large granite boulders seemingly balanced one on top of the other, also in the Serpentine's grounds just around the corner. The shell's smooth, swollen surface is broken by a strange black box that sticks out and provides a window out from the interior. The entrance of the pavilion is accessed from a ramp around the back, which brings you up to an elliptical space that swerves around a hole in the centre. Inside, the sculptural fibreglass structure is translucent and womb-like. It has the quality of papier mâché, with the scars of its reinforcements on show and raw edges like those of plaster casts. In parts it looks as if Radic himself has hacked away at the shell with scissors, like he would with a small model or maquette, to reveal openings to the landscape around. 'I feel like a giant made this model for the city of London with his big hands,' he says.

Press begin to gather for the launch conference

Radic prefers to call it a folly rather than a pavilion, referring to the history of small romantic constructions popular in parks and gardens across England and France during the 18th century. 'A folly gives the project its own personality,' he says. 'A folly historically and romantically presents a disturbance, an atmosphere, they have to occupy and create a symbolic place. The idea of ruins, for example, give you the sensation that the volume is broken up. You feel like you are inside but at the same time outside. It gives you the sensation of Brutalism, something really strong and crude.' Radic cites as influences Cedric Price's aviary (1961), one of his few built projects, and Berthold Lubetkin's penguin pool (1933-34) at London Zoo. 'It was really important for me to go to the zoo and see this pavilion of birds. It pushed me to think freely,' he says.

The pavilion is lifted above the ground giving it the appearance of a floating spaceship

He refers to natural forms, found objects, leftover materials, weathering and what he terms 'fragile constructions'. The pavilion has its roots in some of his earlier projects, in particular The Castle of the Selfish Giant (2010), a model made of papier mâché that is based on the 1888 short story by Oscar Wilde. Fragile and ephemeral, it looks like a forgotten artefact found and rescued by archaeologists. 'I would like to express the sensation of masking tape or the papier mâché models I made four years ago,' he says of the Serpentine pavilion. 'In the end it was like making a small model, but a big one. It looks like it is handmade but it is really not.'

While the facade appears solid from the outside, inside it becomes more transclucent

For the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, Radic, along with his wife Marcela Correa, transported a large granite rock to the Arsenale and carved a perfumed cedar wood refuge inside with just enough space for a person. It was inspired by the sense of protection felt in David Hockney's haunting etching, The Boy Hidden in a Fish, which drew on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Like the Serpentine pavilion, the tactile cocoon of the Biennale acted as a sanctuary, in this case as a response to the disaster of the Chilean earthquake of the same year. 'I wanted to get the atmosphere of this illustration into a model or something physical that I could make, because being physical makes it real,' Radic said in a conversation with Peyton-Jones and Obrist in June.

The floor is wooden decking, 'as if the interior was a terrace rather than a protected interior space,' says Radic

Rocks, it seems, are something of a common theme in Radic's work, perhaps inspired by his wife's work as a sculptor. 'The stones look expensive, but for us they are cheap, it's more or less just the cost of the transport,' he says. In his Mestizo restaurant in Santiago (2007), for example, Radic used bulky lumps of granite to support black concrete beams. His House A (2008), also in Chile, similarly placed rocks on the building's blackened terrace, forming a counterpoint to the sharp point of the house's roof. Other houses by Radic are equally poetic and powerful, in remote rural settings, mountainous terrains or on the rocky coastline of Chile. For Extension of the Charcoal Burner's Hut (1999) Radic constructed a mud-plastered sphere that looked like a giant prehistoric boulder, to demonstrate the process of charcoal making in the Chilean region surrounding Culipran. Like the traditional furnaces called hornos de barro that convert thorn wood into fuel, the installation was meant to gradually crumble and fade away back into the landscape.

A black opening in the shell allows views inside and out

Radic refers to the Serpentine pavilion as a 'new ruin'. He says, 'Ruins compress the time: you see the past and you see the future. You see an idea in continuity. This could be a new ruin because the fibreglass on top is crude, whereas normally fibreglass is really shiny, but this is unfinished, a ruin of the material, and the rocks are the same. In every culture, rocks give you the sensation of the primitive, that the stone will be here forever, as part of the landscape.' But he doesn't seem disappointed that the pavilion will be on show for just three months until October.

Radic describes the rocks as 'appearing as if they had always been part of the landscape'

'Follies are very ephemeral. The beauty of this commission is that they sell it to other places and it will be somewhere else, that will be great.' To him, it's a folly that transcends the range or limits of time. It could be from the Stone Age but it could also be from the future.

Extension of the Charcoal Burner's Hut, 1999 

House A, 2008

Mestizo restaurant, Santiago, 2007