Like a low chrome cloud above Kensington Gardens, an amalgam of mercury floating tantalisingly just free of gravity, the 2009 Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion was introduced to London and the world yesterday…

Designed by Japanese firm SANAA, aka Kazuyo Sejima and her partner Ryue Nishizawa, this is the ninth pavilion to be built, according to the original brief, by a leading overseas firm yet to build in the UK, and the second by a Japanese firm, after Toyo Ito’s mindbending fractal pavilion of 2002. And, as has become the norm for the oeuvre of this self-effacing couple, it is stunning in its understatement. 

While completely different in its nature from Ito’s earlier pavilion, SANAA’s can also be seen as an object deeply rooted in Japanese culture and philosophy. The concept of ‘ma’ or ‘negative space’ has no direct translation in western languages, but talks of ‘a palpable space between two parts’. It is an understanding that space or ‘nothingness’ can itself be spatially charged. The concept pervades the design of Japanese Edo period gardens, temples and houses, and manifests itself in its 17th century paintings as oceans of space between brushstrokes. It is also present in their tea ceremony bowls – the most highly prized of which have their sides pushed in and warped by the hand of the artist, as if the vessel itself has been frozen in the process of imploding. To western eyes, we read these spaces as either unfinished or flawed, but ‘Ma’ is, in a sense, at the heart of what it is to be Japanese. 

Ito, Sejima’s sempai, or mentor, chose to express this as the light filled fractal voids that defined the space as much, if not more than, his angular walls. Seven years later, SANAA have done away with the walls altogether, taken the pavilion’s roof and turned it into a thin plane of polished aluminium that moves in section and serpentines its way around the trees of the gallery. The gesture is a simple one, but the effect is nothing less then sublime. Free to reflect the landscape beyond, the roof of the pavilion at times dissolves into it, defining itself only by the perceived ‘warp’ in the conventional view. Wandering between the stainless steel columns, events- a cyclist riding by, a jogger, a car, register themselves on its surface and to the viewer despite being out of eyeshot. The smooth concrete floor beneath denotes the boundary of the pavilion and forms the second surface between which SANAA sandwich their electrostatic space. Standing here, even raindrops, dripping from the roof’s sides to the gravel below are reversed in reflection, defy gravity and appear to drip with equal and opposite force, back to the sky. 

The power of SANAA’s work is in their ability to bring out, through their use of space and materials, the magical and illusory qualities of a context, and this is no exception. Through one simple gesture, the firm have created something that not only reveals the often ignored or overlooked qualities of a specific place, but which also throws light on their own natures as Japanese. And it’s funky. And throwaway. Two other Japanese concepts, albeit more contemporary ones. Thankfully, the Serpentine pavilion commission is alive and well, and this year’s confirms Sejima and Nishizawa as not only masters of architectural poetry, but High Cool.