Marina Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion 2025 Explores Climate & Community

The Serpentine Pavilion is a rare and thoughtful initiative—a space where ideas and drawings take physical form, then are experienced by a wide mix of people: gallery-goers, corporate types, school groups, joggers, dog walkers, passing tourists.

This annual commission invites an architect (and sometimes an artist) to construct a temporary structure in the heart of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park in London. And since its inception 25 years ago (the impressive list of names include Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Theaster Gates) the Pavilion has offered a stage for ideological and cultural expression, revealing what preoccupies us—socially, politically, environmentally. It brings critical thinking into physical space.

These structures are often open, inviting spaces that encourage those who may not typically engage with architecture to experience design in an intimate, tangible way. We all have favorites (mine, the theatrical Theaster Gates of 2022), and many memories of meeting up with friends and family, attending talks and performances.

This year’s “A Capsule in Time” hopes to do the same. Designed by architect and educator Marina Tabassum and her studio, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), the Pavilion centers on a courtyard built around a semi-mature, climate-resilient ginkgo tree, its axis aligned with the bell tower of the neighboring Serpentine South gallery.

Drawing inspiration from Tabassum’s native Bangladesh—from its culture of park-going to the arched garden canopies that filter soft daylight through green foliage—the structure shifts gently between interior and exterior, between material tactility and openness, light and shadow, height and volume. Built entirely from wood, light plays a pivotal role: a translucent façade scatters daylight as it enters the space—though on the wet, gloomy morning of the opening, I was left to imagine it all on a better day. There’s also a kinetic element, with one of the capsule forms designed to shift and connect, gently reconfiguring the space and altering how we move through it.

I met with the architect Marina Tabassum at the Serpentine Pavilion.

Nargess Banks: What are your thoughts about the Serpentine Pavilion initiative, and the narrative built around the pavilions that came before you?

Marina Tabassum: It’s a very interesting way of showcasing architecture. In an architectural exhibition you have drawings and models and images that really don’t make you feel what architecture does—until and unless you experience it.

(With this initiative) the architect brings in their own ethos and practice and values when they come here and build something, which then immediately creates a kind of a connection with the practice and the people who are building it. In that sense, I think it’s a nice way of showcasing architecture and inviting people who haven’t built in London before to create something here. And, you know, for us architects, for the last 25 years, it has turned into a sort of a legacy and to be a part of it is always wonderful.

Banks: The Pavilion may be impermanent, but it often finds a new home and another life after its so-called residency in the fall. Architects also tend to use locally sourced and repurposed materials in its construction. With the climate emergency long a lived reality in Bangladesh, sustainability must be central to your practice. Can you speak to that?

Tabassum: The building has a second life and it doesn’t end up in a landfill. And yes we have sourced locally and thought sustainability. For instance, the floor you see here seeps the water through, replenishing the water system underneath. The foundation that we’ve used is also a foundation that has been used previously in other pavilions. And then Serpentine itself is a free gallery, and the money that is raised from here (from the events staged at the Pavilion during the summer) helps raise critical funds for the galleries. So, in that sense it is a nice sustainability model.

Banks: To my mind the Pavilion project is a wonderful stage for architects to visualize and communicate their ideas and ethos—perhaps even explore new avenues during and after the project. Do you see the experience having an impact on your own work going forward?

Tabassum: Every architect who has worked on this project has come with their own uniqueness, with their own stories. Each one is quite different and quite beautiful. And yes the process definitely impacts in some ways, and it manifests through other works too. You know, architecture is a journey. Concreteness wouldn’t be interesting.

Banks: Your architecture is rooted in place—in climate, community and context. How do you transpose that ethos to the heart of London’s Kensington Gardens, and what does it mean to bring a pavilion from Bangladesh to Britain, both symbolically and materially?

Tabassum: I wanted to contextualise it: being in the park was important to me, as was the connection to the gallery. Our practice is very much based in the whole notion of sustainability and working with climate, especially in the Bangladesh context. I’m also trying to bring in my own understanding and my own ethos. There is the notion of light, which for me—coming from Bangladesh and being in a pavilion and in our context—the form is a nod to the shamas (lightweight, impermanent canopy structures). And consequently, the light and the colors that the structure gives is a sort of abstract way of bringing my own experiences in.

Banks: You’ve spoken of an “architecture of relevance,” one that responds to urgency, not just aesthetics. In today’s increasingly volatile political climate, where public space feels more contested than ever, what role do you see this year’s Serpentine Pavilion playing, as a structure, but also as communicating other kinds of ways of us being together—of our humanity?

Tabassum: A structure like this in architecture basically gives you a container, right? It’s a space to come and congregate, to be here. And London has this possibility of bringing in diverse people with their own uniqueness to come and gather here. And you need to set aside all your differences in opinion and just to be here, be human in many ways.

There’s so much dialogue that can take place in this large, generous space. I really hope that this is what architecture does best: gives you a space, gives a platform where a lot of conversations can happen. And I really hope that this pavilion can generate that.

The Serpentine Pavilion 2025 “A Capsule in Time,” by Marina Tabassum will be in Kensington Gardens, London from June 6 to October 26 2025.

Read more articles by Nargess Banks including Stockholm’s Market Art Fair, a review of “Typologien” at Fondazione Prada in Milan, and her year in art.