The Red Sun Pavilion

Stretches of leafy trees creating depth of field. An aura of calm floats in the air.

Jean Nouvel
Paris, March 2010



This year's Serpentine Pavilion by Jean Nouvel is a gazebo the size of a small jazz bar - and could match Ronnie Scott's for atmosphere, if you go with the continental mood.



Just the sight of this pavilion is a pleasure (so more photos than usual in this posting). If you can find a half-hour to while away some time there, even better - it's around until 17th October. I wouldn't have missed the experience: a huge contrast with my journey to get there, it set me up for the rest of the day.

I wasn't looking for a garden architecture cure when I arrived at Victoria Station around half-twelve on a simmeringly hot day in August. Just searching out a few interesting things to do before visiting a friend in hospital - ideally places I could take some photos or pick up a few postcards to show later. The geometrical design of this year's Serpentine pavilion might appeal; afterwards, I was going on to the Picasso exhibition at the Gagosian.

After riotously crowded train, tube and bus rides, fortunately, as mentioned in my last routine, I got off a stop too early and strolled over towards the gallery via a luxuriant avenue. Then it was on through the park, following aptly serpentine paths lined with ancient trees.


My first sight of Jean Nouvel's pavilion was a primary red wall futuristically radiating sunlight ('DAZZLING . . . A HAZE OF RED . . . like closing your eyes against the sun', in his own words). Past this impressively stark and monumental surface rippling with colour, the structure appeared so open that my initial impression was of scaffolding for a twenty-first century circus tent, probably because of a shapeless piece of canvas hanging inside (a stage curtain of some kind?). A little underwhelming, at first. But, as I discovered, I was missing the point: this wasn't a pavilion just to look at but to spend time in.

Not tempted by what seemed to be a makeshift stand-up cafe/bar and airport cafeteria tables and chairs (I later saw there was more to the interiors too), I headed over to a majestic bank of seating, with matching china red cushions, that reminded me of Gaudi's sinuous tiled mosaic seats in Parc Guell - Brighton also has a fairly recently built row of seating, with inlaid spotlights, in the pedestrianised New Road opposite the Theatre Royal. As you can see, what's different about Nouvel's infinity bench is that the support is diagonally slanted. If you let yourself go here, as most people ultimately did, though some took their time, perching on the edge or sitting bolt upright for a bit, that tilt will potentially transform your mood and personality (more dramatically than a Laz-E-Boy as you're in a public place and there's no inbetween stage). If you can allow yourself to lean back, before you know it, you are laidback. All I can say is it was very relaxing.


The tables in front of the lounge seating had chessboards painted on them, but there were no pieces. Children loved the place, treating the cafe like a playground and the lounge seats like a climbing frame, not in an annoying way, amazingly, just having fun - scurrying up the slope as if climbing up a slide and only just making it to the top before perilously walking along the ridge behind adults who were now almost horizontal and just enjoying the spectacle. On that hot summer's day, the shady pavilion fulfilled the original function of such structures, as originating in Persian pleasure grounds where intersecting paths crossed a pool to meet in the centre at a life-preserving shelter from the heat.

After you've unwound and enjoyed taking it all in, you can wander about a little. Newly appreciative of the space, I walked through the cafe to the table tennis tables just out front and surveyed the scene. Everyone seemed happily absorbed in what they were doing - table tennis players, friends chatting or just sitting and relaxing in the cafe and in what I suppose might once have been called a chill-out area, though lounge suits it better perhaps. I discovered a little corridor behind the bar leading to a mirror-like artwork in alluring shades of red and dusky orange that was a see-through photograph of people sitting in the pavilion's cafe - a double-take. You could see people pass behind it and follow them around to an enclosed garden with raised flower beds - strips of summery planting with burgundy and orange canna ('FLEETING SUMMER . . . green against red . . . red berries, vegetables and flowers') with a wide red hammock as a centrepiece. This carefully ordered plot gave a sense of being encircled by gardens and grounds - a feeling of being cocooned, despite the public nature of the space.

The hot red pavilion maps on to the cool elegance of the gallery behind it: the structures are thrown into relief and complement each other. The wider landscape is embraced by this temporary building; although it will only be with us for another couple of months, there's something about a transient garden house that's celebratory - of the possibilities of architecture and summer? In Elizabethan times, a spectacular temporary structure was a keynote of festivities.

A pavilion gives you some time out - offers an escape. Garden structures gather people together to relax and enjoy their surroundings and each other's company in a less formal and more private way than usual.

A space like Jean Nouvel's Red Sun Pavilion shows us we're social beings: there's no need to do anything in particular, but it's good to be with other people. Free to stay as long or as fleetingly as you like, in wild contrast with my starting-point, Victoria, which passengers barrel through as quickly as they can, you will probably spend more time there than expected and will emerge recharged.

While you're there, don't miss the Wolfgang Tillman exhibition at the gallery - also free (donations welcome though).

Lastly, a Sussex connection. The Collector Earl's Garden, designed by Isabel and Julian Bannerman at Arundel Castle (opened 2008) has a charming, miniature banqueting house decorated with wooden antlers and leaves. What makes this garden a true wonder is the elaborate shell grotto based on an Inigo Jones stage set design with its mesmerising jet fountain with a spinning crown.

An extraordinarily inventive garden, it's the sort of thing I picture when reading rapturous first-hand accounts of gardens like Kenilworth, Theobalds, Nonsuch and Beddington.

Club Tropicana

Welcome to the jungle

Making a garden is often about transforming your environment; outside spaces can offer more scope for imaginative exploration and experimentation than interiors. They're more changeable and, if you garden in pots, moveable.

Brighton and Hove Council's gardeners have this summer planted up some of the busiest areas in the city with tropical flowerbeds designed to suggest an 'urban jungle'. On the Old Steine, near the Royal Pavilion, you'll find banana trees (musa trees), kangaroo apples (a shrub usually found, no surprise, in Australia) and ornamental grasses. I often drive along here but hadn't noticed any of this - I just happened to pick up a copy of our local paper the Argus at the gym and saw the news. The headline was 'Hot weather encouraging exotic tree growth in Brighton and Hove'. There seem to be the beginnings of an enthusiasm for cultivating banana trees here (see Michele Hanson's account of the thrills of growing them, 'Bananas in north London - whatever next?', 5 August '10).

On foot, I found that the new flowerbeds were grouped around a Regency fountain in what had become a traffic island - if you find them hard to spot, just look, as I did, for flag-like banana leaves billowing and flapping in the bracing seafront breezes and squalls. The new planting made me and others take a closer look at the candelabra fountain with its ferocious-looking dolphins cleverly supporting the middle basin with their tails. The fountain seems quite baroque in style; intriguingly, it seems that it replaced a stone circle and some of the stones were incorporated into the base ('Steine' means stone, and the area was once covered with stones used by fishermen to dry their nets).

What struck me most, however, were the six people happily squeezed on to a bench (count them) backed by the new planting, looking at the fountain, which was also popular with seagulls (there's one perched on the look-out at the the top, like a Brighton emblematic beast). The group of friends seemed like they'd been there for a while - and they were still there when I left - even though it was a stormy day. On another bench, backed by planting that mixes musa trees and kangaroo apples with dahlias, nasturtiums and millet, two friends were engrossed in conversation (see below: the man walking away, looking very happy, had just snapped the photogenic seagull on the path).

Successful gardens attract people and wildlife, and I think you can tell how they rank by how happy people and other creatures are there; with imaginative planting, this traffic island has been transformed into an elegant and, thanks to the tropical touches, exotic fountain parterre.

It's a month since the plants were put in and so now's the perfect time to see them - the gardeners said it would take that long for them to bed in properly. See them while you can, though: at the end of the summer, the banana plants and grasses will go back to the council nursery at Stanmer Park for the winter, to reappear next year.

Quickly, just to mention the council gardeners' soft spot for agapanthus this summer: see their eye-catching planting of blue flowers just along St James's Street in the New Steine (along the railings, opposite, and in a block in the middle of the garden square, see below, facing a bank of rhododendrons) and the profusion of blue and white flowers on the Drive, in Hove, near Cafe Nero (see below right). I took both pictures the same afternoon - Hove first, then on to Brighton where the skies darkened, though that didn't worry the people round the dolphin fountain. Shortly after I took the New Steine pics, there was a downpour, with raindrops the size of 10 pence pieces, followed by thunder and lightning; it brightened up again soon afterwards.

All this brought back to me how so many times in his Herbal, John Gerard, unofficial gardener to Elizabeth I, conveys the excitement of growing plants from distant lands - rising to the challenge yet again and pointing out that although the wonderful plants documented are "strangers to England, notwithstanding I have them in my garden".

(I could stop here, I realise, in the interests of brevity, as promised in my last posting, but after talking with a few readers of the blog, I'm going to add a few more connections, for those who like them - all those in favour of shorter bulletins, stop reading now . . .)

Round-the-world planting


A neighbour recently gave us a tour of his garden where he grows the increasingly popular agapanthus and other less-often-seen plants, such as snow-white gladioli, alstroemeria (Peruvian lilies), and, yes, banana trees. A great traveller, he is from Northern Thailand and has transformed a suburban lawn in Hove into a space where almost every inch is covered with unusual blooms, as well as interesting varieties of well-known plants. The border in the photo to the left surrounds a pond with an ornamental bridge and cascade. The swan statue just visible in the depth of flowers reminds me of Pope's garden at Twickenham: by the river bank there were two sculptures of swans, wings outstretched as if about to take off. When Swift came to stay with Pope for a couple of months in the wake of the furore after his anonymous publication of 'Gulliver's Travels', he paid tribute to him and his magical garden: "You have taught me how to dream".

Recently, our neighbour has changed his vegetable garden into an area for growing cut flowers such as helianthus and alstroemeria (see right); he also has, amongst other things, about a dozen sunflowers growing in pots and gave me two (different varieties - one with the usual dark centre and almond-shaped petals and the other like a golden pompom), now basking on my balcony.
There's a perimeter path around the garden that leads at the top right to an apple tree under which there is a flourishing blueberry bush, day lilies and agapanthus in pots (left).

Last connection for this routine: On my latest visit to the garden, my neighbour showed me an unusual type of canna - the leaves are light stripes of green rather than orange/wine-dark red (usual variety below).












By coincidence - or gardengoing synchronicity - on my way to see this summer's Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, I got off one stop early and followed a beautiful avenue with magnificent planting (left), at the end of which was a glorious border with, you guessed, agapanthus (see below, at the back).

If you look closely, below the large-leafed plant, nestled in the earth in front of the red band of flowers, you can see a sunbathing robin - undeterred and unnoticed by the many agapanthus paparazzi, the robin soaked up a few rays before taking off when a lady leant a bit too far over the railings.
Leaving the avenue, the Albert Memorial was surrounded by 'hot' border planting, with gorgeous dark red dahlias and brilliant flowering canna, that reminded me of similar borders at Hatfield and the Walled Garden at Cowdray.






Next routine: Jean Nouvel's Serpentine pavilion and garden buildings ancient and modern