Confronting contiguity in Hyde Park

While strolling in the park, JAY MERRICK stumbles upon a structure that fuses art, architecture and mathematics. It's like Euclid on acid, man.

LONDON - Sometimes, art and architecture are indivisible, and just such a rare fusion is taking place in London. To experience it effectively requires a brisk stroll - conveyance by bus or taxi won't do - to London's Serpentine Gallery starting from, say, South Kensington Underground station. This will take the pedestrian through an aesthetic war zone, and then into a synthesis of forms whose mysterious connection was eventually revealed on Mick the biker's T-shirt in a nearby cafe.

We're talking contiguity. (Cue interjection from The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Contiguity: 1 being contiguous; proximity; contact. 2 Psychol. The proximity of ideas or impressions in place or time.) A good physical example of contiguity is the humble bottle: the inside and the outside are composed of the same contiguous surface. But can two separate objects form a single contiguous thing?

In the search for an answer we've passed through the exit barriers at South Ken and we're making our way along the tunnel to Exhibition Road in a tiled and ironworked Victorian gloaming whose light seems, at times, to waver into sepia; and then it's up the steps into Exhibition Road and past the dog's dinner of the V&A Museum's classical Facades-U-Like on your right and that vile, swinging Sixties thing attached to the Natural History Museum on your left. Exhibition Road is an architectural Krakatoa, and the only thing to do is to get out of it as soon as possible. Nothing contiguous will be found here.

But queasiness will soon abate. Two minutes later, striding north and looking neither to right nor left, the confines of Hyde Park are breached. A moment later - with the sun shining as brilliantly as it was last Tuesday at midday - the retina is branded by something unrecognisable nestling among the trees alongside the Serpentine Gallery. The image can be described only clumsily as searing magnesium lines running at random angles across gradations of metallic lustre.

As we approach, we see that it is a structure. It has walls, but not exactly; a roof, but not exactly. It looks like a crashed stealth fighter - a splayed crumple-zone of aluminium. This wizard prang is the work of Daniel Libeskind, architect of the planned V&A Spiral, and Cecil Balmond of engineers, Arup.

The summer pavilion they've concocted is rather wonderful. Here is an architecture that uses geometry to create a series of spaces whose mystery is both razor-edged and ungraspable. It's Euclid on acid. The structure is detectable - but to walk in it and around it is to realise that the sum of its spatial possibilities are not.

Libeskind calls it Eighteen Turns and says it's a playful take on origami. It is much more than that - "a special place," as he puts it, "of discovery, intimacy and gathering. The space is seen as part of an infinitely accessible horizon between the gallery and the landscape". In other words, a contiguous fusion of one thing with another. But that's not the contiguity that Enervated of Exhibition Road should be sniffing out. There's a better one and it concerns the exhibits in the Serpentine Gallery itself.

Four of Rachel Whiteread's exhibits are the inside - or should that be outside? - of Libeskind's spatial genie's lamp. First, Wardrobe, a rough-faced plaster cast of an armoire whose vertical division and drawers are indicated by inserted sheets of green glass. The rough finish subverts the simple volumes: you are looking at the representation of a chest of drawers and a rogue thing simultaneously.

Next up: the plaster cast of a bookcase whose inversion solidifies the space around the books. The piece hangs on the wall like the facade of a miniaturised block of balconied flats; and rather Corb-ish it looks, too. Then, Table and Chair, in which Whiteread has solidified in resin the spaces under a table and a nearby chair. It looks like a mausoleum petrified in mucky amber. Finally, Stairs: two flights - one rising vertically, the other flat on its side - whose volumes appear, at first glance, to lead to and from vestibules. But they do not. The solidified lobbies have been rotated so that they are not functional at all, merely perversely detailed lumps. The assemblage is set in the Serpentine's central gallery, whose upper reaches are composed of curves and a large circular ceiling boss decorated with two interlocking eight-pointed stars. Here, space is not the final frontier, but the exponential first of many.

And so, by chance in South Ken, art and architecture meld into one in an examination of contiguous internal and external spaces which Mick (his name enamelled on the crash helmet on the table at the cafe) would presumably grasp instantly. His T-shirt told the story in three stencilled words: Absurdity, Anguish, Freedom.

Apparently absurd forms creating an initially anguished appraisal, and then a marvellous sense of release from the prison of the ordinary. This is what architecture should aim to do. It should not be trendy, glibly seductive or calculatedly iconoclastic. It should serve a functional purpose and provoke a feeling of surprise and engagement about solids and voids and the mysteries of light and space. In short, it should attract. Libeskind's object may have the luxury of not having a complex practical purpose; it may also be a thing of pure geometric wonder. But its real power is that it explodes stolid notions of structure and space.

To look at it is to experience only beginnings. The angles, thrusts and skewed facade-breaks are arranged so that even standing still and moving one's head an inch or two to the left or right produces an almost kaleidoscopic effect: the whole kit and caboodle looks entirely different. Walk round the structure slowly three times and it seems quite different each time. Libeskind, a prodigious classical pianist, shares the same fractured logic that once impelled the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk to produce a seminal bebop album whose spookily apt title, Brilliant Corners, heralded a realm where the end is never in sight.

Except that it is. For the only salutary way to conclude this exercise in contiguity is to proceed back along Exhibition Road, trudge down into the tunnel and, like the subterranean figure in Sassoon's war poem The Rear-Guard, grope along 20 feet below the rosy gloom of battle overhead.

- INDEPENDENT