Standing in her 2018 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion on the green of­­­ London’s Kensington Gardens, Mexican architect Frida Escobedo recalls the start of the project just six months ago: she received an email with the subject line “Invitation” and assumed it was an offer to join the gallery’s mailing list. “After the shock faded,” she laughs, “we began working through many iterations to find something that hadn’t been done before.”

Seventeen other pavilions have occupied the gallery’s lawn, by architects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry. At 38, Escobedo is the youngest yet, and her appointment reflects an ambition in recent years to showcase “architects of global promise, rather than global prominence,” notes gallery CEO Yana Peel.