For something that is essentially a brick wall, the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion is attracting an extraordinary amount of attention.
Every summer, the Serpentine Pavilion arrives in Kensington Gardens as architecture’s seasonal talking point. Some years it has resembled a spaceship, a cloud or an abstract sculpture. This year, designed by Mexican studio LANZA atelier, it takes its cue from something far more familiar: the humble garden wall.
Titled A Serpentine, the pavilion marks the 25th edition of the Serpentine commission, one of the world’s most influential architectural platforms. Designed by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, founders of the Mexico City-based practice LANZA atelier, it is also the first pavilion in the programme’s history to use brick as its primary material.
The inspiration comes from the crinkle-crankle wall, a wonderfully serpentine brick structure most often associated with Suffolk but whose origins stretch back to Ancient Egypt before being introduced to England by Dutch engineers. Composed of alternating curves, these walls are structurally stronger than straight walls while using fewer bricks, making them both elegant and remarkably efficient.
The reference operates on multiple levels. The winding wall echoes the nearby Serpentine Lake, named for its gentle curves, while also evoking the form of a snake moving through the landscape. Beneath a lightweight translucent canopy, the wall sweeps across the site alongside a second curved wall that responds to the surrounding trees. Brick columns create a rhythm reminiscent of a grove, allowing light and air to move freely through the structure and softening the boundary between architecture and landscape.
Yet what makes this pavilion so intriguing is not its form but its philosophy.
LANZA Atelier has built its reputation on finding beauty in the everyday. Their work foregrounds dialogue, collective experience and human encounters. Rather than treating the pavilion as an object to be admired, the architects have conceived it as a place to move through — a structure that both reveals and withholds, shaping movement, framing thresholds and creating moments of pause.
This is where the wall becomes more than a wall.
Traditionally, walls divide. They create boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Here, the opposite happens. Constructed from a rhythmic repetition of brick columns, the wall shifts between opaque and permeable, allowing glimpses of movement beyond. Visitors catch sight of people passing, shadows shifting and trees moving in the wind.
The wall becomes a connector rather than a separator.
The architects describe the serpent not as a threatening figure but as a generative and protective force. They draw parallels with England’s historic fruit walls, which were designed to create shelter, temper the climate and encourage growth. From that idea emerges a pavilion that feels less like a building and more like an environment — one designed to nurture encounter, conversation and community.
Perhaps that is why the project feels particularly timely.
Across Britain, gardens are enjoying a cultural renaissance. Kitchen gardens are being revived, estates are rewilding their land, and a growing number of people are seeking connection through landscape. From regenerative farm stays and estate-to-plate restaurants to outdoor cultural events and community growing projects, some of the most interesting social spaces today are found not in cities but in gardens, orchards and farms.
A Serpentine taps into that shift. It behaves less like a pavilion and more like a garden room — a place designed for shelter, encounter and discovery.
The pavilion’s most remarkable quality, however, may be invisible at first glance.
According to Arienzo, the curves are designed to make visitors more aware of the passing of time itself. As sunlight moves across the walls, shadows accelerate, slow and change direction in ways that straight walls cannot produce.
“Having curves in the walls makes the passing of time much more visible than straight walls because the movement of shade and sunlight suddenly accelerates or breaks,” he explains. “That is already a change of feeling while being there.”
Suddenly, architecture becomes a way of noticing.
Noticing shadows.
Noticing movement.
Noticing the rhythm of a summer afternoon unfolding around you.
For twenty-five years the Serpentine Pavilion has showcased architectural experimentation. Yet this anniversary edition feels remarkably humble. Inspired by ancient walls, English gardens and the winding form of a serpent, it asks visitors not simply to look at architecture but to move through it.
The most interesting thing about A Serpentine may not be its curves or even its bricks. It is the way it reframes the ordinary: a shifting shadow, a glimpse of someone beyond a wall, the movement of leaves in the wind.
In a culture that prizes visibility and spectacle, LANZA atelier has created something rarer — a place of shelter, mystery and encounter. A reminder that sometimes the most meaningful spaces are not the ones that reveal everything at once, but the ones that invite us to keep looking.
• The 2026 Serpentine Pavilion by LANZA Atelier is on show at Kensington Gardens until October 25 2026.
