Serpentine Pavilion 2025: This armadillo-like structure is a surprising wonder

Telegraph

2 days ago

It is 25 years since the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid erected a white angular tent-like structure on a lawn beside the Serpentine Gallery, the first in an annual series of temporary pavilions in Kensington Gardens each designed to accommodate a summer-long programme of talks, parties, and events. Whether sleek or organic, elegant or madcap, these pleasure domes and places for debate are typically experimental and memorable, and, as well as marking the onset of the season, their unveiling elevates architecture to the thrust stage of national conversation. This year, it's the turn of the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, who delivers a pleasing pavilion with a calming, naturally illuminated interior, subtly evocative of a place of worship.
Tabassum's practice has won plaudits for a beautifully stripped-back brick mosque in Dhaka, seemingly capturing and pooling light as if it were a liquid, and a design for a movable bamboo house on stilts inspired by the ephemeral architecture of the Ganges delta. Her alertness to transience is a rare quality among architects, who often yearn for permanence.
Consisting of four curving wooden-and-polycarbonate structures – a pair of half-domes that bookend two tube-like, semi-circular tunnels (reminiscent of those industrial polytunnels in which, in sunnier climes, fruit and veg is grown) – her modular (and, apparently, 'kinetic') pavilion, tritely titled A Capsule in Time, appears, from afar, like the rounded carapace of a gigantic woodlouse – or a nutshell. It bulges beside the red-brick politeness of Serpentine South (itself, a pavilion, built as a teahouse in the 1930s).
Thanks to its brown exterior (up close, the grain of its glue-laminated timber struts is visible), it doesn't clash with its natural surroundings – unlike the swollen neon-orange form, studded with plastic toy bricks, of a second pavilion, to be unveiled next week, designed by Peter Cook in partnership with Lego. This sympathetic effect is enhanced by the presence, at its centre, of a slender gingko tree, aligned with the gallery's bell tower.
Yet, Tabassum's pavilion also has a futuristic feel (its polycarbonate facade catches daylight in an unpleasant, unnatural fashion; how long till those panels become streaky?), and a defensive, armoured quality, despite its openness: those four principal elements give the impression that something tightly closed and intricately secured has been unlocked and stretched out, even sectioned in the manner of a technical exploded-view diagram.
With proportions that call to mind a facility in a military complex (a hangar in an airfield, perhaps?), it looks as if, were the sirens suddenly to go off, it could be snapped shut at the press of a button, to protect people sheltering inside. Initially, the interior's fuselage-like volume made me think of the cigar-shaped cargo compartment of a Hercules military aircraft. Other pavilions have been more graceful.
Yet, inside, Tabassum's aptitude for working with light – that most elusive and insubstantial of architectural materials – becomes evident. The angled panels of the faceted canopy are translucent and variously coloured, with bands of mushroom, buff, and – towards the top – a radiant celadon; thus, soft lights, reminiscent of stained glass, are visible above head height, while, at the building's 25ft-high zenith, transparent panels allow visitors to behold the fluctuations of the sky.
At either end, the glowing half-domes provide some muted spectacle. As well as offering a striking backdrop for talks, these enclosing, quasi-religious forms, again irradiated by washed-out light, should protect passers-by during the damper stretches of a British summer.