Lanza-Atelier

Lanza Atelier’s A Serpentine, the 25th pavilion on the Serpentine South lawn and the second Mexican Serpentine Pavilion in eight years, opened 6 June 2026 and is the first London commission since Peter Zumthor’s 2011 hortus conclusus to lead with a wall rather than a roof. The arc from Frida Escobedo’s 2018 celosia courtyard to Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo’s red-brick crinkle-crankle is the entire Mexican entry in the Serpentine’s twenty-six-year ledger. Two pavilions, eight years apart, both from Mexico City, both built around perforated mass and a careful argument with the lawn — and yet they read as opposite propositions about what Mexico City exports to Kensington Gardens. ...

Twenty-six summers, twenty-six architects, and one impossible brief — design a London building before you are allowed to design a London building. The Serpentine Pavilion architects, from Zaha Hadid in 2000 to Lanza Atelier in 2026, have together built the most reliable predictor in contemporary architecture of who will define the next decade of museums, biennales and pavilions. Read the commission as a long roster — Hadid, Libeskind, Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, OMA, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, Sou Fujimoto, Smiljan Radić, SelgasCano, BIG, Francis Kéré, Frida Escobedo, Junya Ishigami, Counterspace, Theaster Gates, Lina Ghotmeh, Mass Studies, Marina Tabassum, Lanza Atelier — and the line reads as a forward index to the next twenty Pritzkers, Venice directorships and global museum jobs. The pavilion does not predict the future; it commissions it. ...