The author of the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion 2025 will be Marina Tabassum

The author of the 24th summer pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London will be Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, who was named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world last year, and in 2021, The New York Times included her construction of the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque among the 25 most significant post-war works in the world (for this project, she also received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016).
Her London project A Capsule in Time consists of a lightweight wooden structure that draws on the temporary nature of all previous pavilions that are erected for a few months every summer in front of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. The design also refers to the everyday life in the Bengal Delta (the confluence of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers), where water flowing from the Himalayan mountains often forces people to relocate their homes, a phenomenon that the author often reflects on in her work.

“In the Bengal Delta, architecture is ephemeral because dwellings shift their locations along with the changing flow of the rivers. Architecture becomes a memory of inhabited spaces, whose life continues through storytelling. When conceptualizing our design, we reflected on the transience of the commission, which seems to us like a capsule preserving memory and time. The relationship between time and architecture is intriguing: between permanence and ephemerality, birth, aging, and decay; architecture strives to transcend time.”
A Capsule in Time will consist of four wooden arched modules, which will be filled with transparent panels. The individual parts of the structure will be separated from each other, with a tree symmetrically planted in the central element aligned with the bell tower of the historic Serpentine Gallery building. The pavilion will open to visitors on June 6 and will be accessible in Kensington Gardens until October 26, 2025.

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