There's usually no cheering in London when the mid-summer skies over Kensington Gardens thicken and black clouds appear over the park;

one accepts the typical rain with professional composure.

That could change this year, because the structure that the American artist and architect Theaster Gates placed in the park on the grounds of the Serpentine Gallery turns the frequent downpours here into an aesthetic and social event: in the roof of the round, In the black wooden chapel, reminiscent of a huge drum, there is also a circular opening, comparable to that of the Pantheon in Rome.

When it rains, an ephemeral sculpture forms in the center of the room, a column of falling water;

nature performs a work of art

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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As in the house of Michelangelo Antonioni in Sardinia, which also has an open courtyard in the middle, the opening acts as a perception enhancer of nature: the glistening and rushing of the water, the smell of the wet earth have an even more intense effect on this stage than outside .

Each year for more than twenty years, the Serpentine Gallery has invited an architect, who has never before built in England, to create a temporary pavilion for the summer months, intended above all to be a meeting place where Londoners meet and spend time together should spend.

Like the classic follies in British parks, the Serpentine Pavilion has always been one of the few sheltered spots in the city where you can sit for days, meet friends and play with your kids without paying for your stay have to.

Especially for a thoroughly commercialized city like London, the pavilion has always been a kind of counter-public, showing how one could live together,

This year Theaster Gates, born in 1973 and living in Chicago, was invited.

The studied urban planner became known as the singer of the Black Monks of Mississippi and as an activist who, with musicians, artists and social work, resettled houses in areas that were considered problematic and turned them into new meeting places for the residents: sometimes collective living rooms, sometimes small theaters and stages.

At Documenta 13, Gates built the remains of a demolished American house into the Huguenot house in Kassel, which had been vacant since the 1970s, and showed long before the so-called Bauwende how the remains of demolished houses can be reused and become part of an ecological, but also socially valuable recycling economy.

In the style of local handicraft traditions

The Black Chapel, designed by the architect David Adjaye, is a new construction.

Typologically, it is reminiscent of the wooden chapels and theater buildings from Shakespeare's time, not least of his Globe Theater called "Wooden O", which was built in 1599 on the south bank of the Thames.

One can certainly read this appeal as an attempt to build in a resource-saving manner and in the style of local craft traditions in London, where in recent years more and more elaborate and mannered concrete-and-glass towers in the shape of beaks, cucumbers and razors have been growing into the sky .

Gates' circular home opens onto the park through two tall, opposing portals;

a partition wall placed in the golden section separates the larger, stage-like part from a more intimate backstage area where the bar is located.

There were pavilions that looked like mazes, playgrounds, or spaceships;

this time the atmosphere inside is more reminiscent of sacred buildings and theater buildings.

Inside the building, Gates hung seven monochrome silver panel paintings.

If you get closer to it, you can see that it is silver-lacquered tar paper, like that used by roofers.

The images, Gates said, are a tribute to his recently deceased father, who was a roofer.

The seven silver images give the simple, artless material of the roofing felt - and with it the lives of the African-American workers, to whom Gates' father belonged and who provide protection and a home in precarious conditions - a dignity of their own.

The Black Chapel is also an art-historical echo of the quasi-sacral staging of abstract modern art in the Rothko Chapel, for example.

But it is also a political comment at a moment when American museums in particular are critically revising their own “white” collection history and finally giving space and visibility to long-marginalized Afro-American artists, while European museums are still waiting for a comparable revision.

Above all, the Black Chapel is a stage formally linked to the early theater buildings of the Elizabethan era - and thus to a historical moment when the art went from entertainment for the privileged classes to a pleasure for all.

Sometimes there will be readings here, often music and concerts.

And sometimes the chapel will be just a big umbrella that brings those seeking shelter together for a moment and surprises them by turning even the rain into a rushing work of art.

Theater Gates: Serpentine Pavilion.

In Kensington Gardens, London;

from June 10th to October 16th.