The Art Newspaper

Seeing the wood despite the trees

Timber pavilions and parkland cafés are part of Carmody Groarke’s plan to increase the fair’s space

By Javier Pes. From Frieze daily edition
Published online: 13 October 2011

Two of the three architects of the new Frieze pavilion, Anna Nilsson and Kevin Carmody

No trees,” declares Andy Groarke, “were hurt in the making of this fair”—even though more of Regent’s Park has been embraced by Frieze in this, its ninth year, than ever before. To do so safely, the architects of this year’s edition, Carmody Groarke Architects, measured every one of the affected trees, down to individual branches and “even leaves”, before they finalised the addition of 800 sq. m of space to the front of the art fair’s main tents. Before we get to the practical challenges—no mean feat in a Royal Park—Groarke, along with colleagues Kevin Carmody and Anna Nilsson, the project architect, explains the benefits of, and thinking behind, increasing the fair’s footprint.

“We wanted to make the spaces for showing art more generous,” Carmody says. Because the main tents, all 21,000 sq. m of them, cannot get any bigger (they are limited by the trees in the park), Carmody Groarke has moved two of the cafés into new structures at the front, looping around the trees. This year, therefore, visitors find that the fair has sprouted branches.

Expansive ideas

The idea for these additions emerged, say the architects, from conversations with the fair’s co-directors, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, to make “the café spaces a little less problematic with the adjacencies of the galleries”, Groarke says. “The galleries can remain contemplative and the cafés can be vibrant, buzzy social spaces.” This year is an experiment, he says, a “slight decoupling” of these two aspects of the fair, which if successful will be repeated until 2013. (The Frieze architectural commission is for three years.)

Another of its key aspects is to accommodate the Frieze artists’ commissions. The architects are familiar with this mix of aesthetic and practical challenges. They helped to realise Carsten Höller’s Double Club, his West-meets-Congo-in-London pop-up bar, in 2008, and Antony Gormley’s fog-filled pavilion, Blind Light, 2007, in London’s Hayward Gallery. At Frieze this year, the artists’ projects range from creating a media centre for the London-based collective LuckyPDF to an interactive cricket-style score board for the Dutch duo Bik Van der Pol.

The architects know how to work to tight deadlines. For Frieze, Nilsson explains, they had just ten days on site to build the five pavilions. Carmody Groarke’s temporary restaurant, which overlooked the Olympic Stadium site this summer (it was built on the roof of the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre when it was still a building site), went from winning the commission to opening in just ten weeks.

In a temporary structure, “we realised that the bigger idea is read, rather than the finesse,” Carmody says. That said, the architects have gone to great lengths to make sure that everything has come together on site in Regent’s Park with the minimum of last-minute surprises. They created a full-scale mock-up of one of the sections of the pavilions in the workshop of the contractors, MDM, who also build the gallery booths inside the main tents.

For the pavilions, the architects chose lightweight, low-cost materials. The timber frames are made of reconstituted wood, which is as green and sustainable as can be. The textured and clear polycarbonate sheeting forming the walls and roofs is perhaps less so. Everything had to be designed so that it could be put up and taken down quickly. The pavilions are also designed to be reused for the next two fairs. Their semi-transparent walls and roofs mean that the pavilions appear “crystalline” during the day, and then, after dusk, they “switch” into glowing spaces, illuminated from within.

Getting the pavilions ready in time depended on a close working relationship with the technicians at MDM, who prefabricated sections in their Brixton workshop. The architects also teamed up with Scan Lab, which, early in the project, created a three-dimensional colour model of the site where the pavilions would go. “[The model] samples the surfaces of the major branches and leaves with millions of dots. Trees move a little bit with wind but it allowed us to set out with a fair degree of accuracy the structures around the trees,” Carmody says. Hence the architects’ confidence that every tree, and its full autumnal glory, would be unaffected by their week at Frieze.

Fortress Frieze

Groarke compares the art fair in a park to a fortified city built on a grid. The meeting points are its squares and the aisles its “boulevards”. By adding linear pavilions, the architects aim to take those avenues “and extend them into a walk in the park”. The promenade “then got wrapped around themselves and the trees”, Groarke says.

Were they tempted to change other aspects of the fair’s layout? “Some things work really well and there’s no reason to change them for the sake of change,” Carmody says. Besides, moving something like the main entrance corridor, which deposits visitors in the centre of the fair, would dramatically “reshuffle the pack” of galleries, potentially upsetting the delicate geopolitics of the event.

The entrances to the café pavilions are roughly where refreshment points were in previous years, a navigational help to regular Frieze visitors. Circulation during the fair is always challenging, admits Groarke.

“It’s such a big space and your orientation is really based on simple graphic measures, remembering where galleries were or the colour of avenues within the grid. We are trying to highlight particular points in the fair and to reconnect with the fact that you’re in Regent’s Park. You have a moment where you focus on a tree in a courtyard. That’s a very different experience to viewing art.”

The fair’s previous architects, David Adjaye, Jamie Fobert and Caruso St John, tweaked the event’s now fairly set formula. Carmody Groarke rejects the idea that, confronted by the behemoths of the tents, the choice is to either disguise or embrace their utilitarian design. “I don’t think that’s the interest in this opportunity,” says Groarke. “It’s about looking at moments in an epic event and finding a way to enhance them. People react very simply to buildings, and at Frieze, they remember the art, not the tents.”