One of the most famous architects in the world, Frank Gehry, said yesterday that he thinks the English just don't get him. "I've been told so many times by so many people, 'we really admire your work' - but I always hear an unspoken 'just don't put any of it here'."
Cities all over the world have beseeched Gehry to work for them, since the Guggenheim museum he built in a rundown Spanish port in 1997 launched "the Bilbao effect" and became a watchword for urban regeneration through culture. He did complete a care home in Dundee, but yesterday his very first English building was finally unveiled: the Serpentine Gallery's annual pavilion in Kensington Gardens, which will be gone before the leaves fall.
Gehry is the latest in a procession of starry architects, including Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Libeskind, who have been persuaded to put aside their regular work and create a midsummer folly.
Gehry's pavilion formally opens next week with a concert by his friend, the composer Thomas Adès, but its spectacular roofline, inspired by Da Vinci's drawings for giant catapult siege engines, has already risen above the trees. It's not that he did not have time for permanent English commissions, he revealed, it is just that - with the exception of a now abandoned plan for a pair of wriggly tower blocks on Hove's seafront - nobody asked.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
