Serpentine should know better... and so should Peter Cook

Peter Cook asks if anyone out there agrees with him; I can only very bluntly state that I do not. I find the ZHA Serpentine Sackler Gallery project extremely mediocre and damaging to what was until recently a very pleasing little piece within the Hyde Park landscape.

It is not so much the choice of a dialectic response to the existing building that troubles me as the absolute lack of subtlety in its resolution. The new extension has all the characteristics of a tired representative of a bygone self-proclaimed “avant garde” and fails to form with the existing gallery buildings anything beyond a sum of disappointing parts.

A more subtle response would have been appropriate and I could think of many architects who could have provided something infinitely more appealing. It is a shame that the gallery has not shown the same flair for this project as it has for its excellent temporary pavilion programme.

I find Cook’s disregard of what he considers “a certain brand of dour, repetitive, featureless, even grim architecture” and the alleged “shrillness” and “myopia”of any of its supporters rather cute. It reminds me of Colonels Korn and Cathcart’s comment in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22: “You’re either for us or against your country. It’s as simple as that.”

The gallery has had the (perhaps sole) merit of sparking a debate; I would however have hoped that it could rise above the level that Cook proposes.

Comparisons with toilets have never formed the basis for a good argument outside of the primary school playground and I am slightly troubled that someone obviously fortunate enough to be “enlightened by the opportunity to travel, to hear good lectures and to get acquainted with an international level of critical comment” cannot raise the bar a little higher.

Jean-Paul Jaccaud
Geneva