Serpentine-Pavilion

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. ...

Lina Ghotmeh’s “Reality is Fluid” manifesto, published in Domus 1112 on 28 May 2026, is best read backwards — as a Rosetta stone you hold up to Stone Garden in Beirut, the 550,000-brick Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, and the timber Serpentine Pavilion of 2023 to discover that they were all making the same argument before she gave it a name. The Lina Ghotmeh manifesto is short on prescription and long on syntax — a single ecological sentence stretched across two decades of built work, from the 356-metre Estonian National Museum in Tartu to the unbuilt revolving forest observatory at Nanto. Read in order, the projects index the manifesto more clearly than the manifesto indexes the projects. ...