Narrow your eyes, and the 20th annual Serpentine Pavilion looks like the kind of ruined neoclassical folly you might find in the 18th-century parkland of London’s Kensington Gardens. Look more closely, and its thick walls and fluted columns tell a more contemporary story about the city and its inhabitants. Designed by 31-year-old Sumayya Vally of the South African practice Counterspace, the monumental structure is based on a study of gathering places where London’s migrant communities have found a sense of belonging. They range from institutions such as churches and cultural centers to spaces of everyday life in multicultural areas such as Hackney and Peckham. The architect has also reached out to some of those neighborhoods by placing small satellite structures—conceived as fragments of the pavilion—in four local cultural spaces.
“We have a focus on working with all of London’s communities,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, which hosts the pavilion each year. “We didn’t want the pavilion to be something that only happens on the gallery’s lawn. It also works with the urban tissue of the city.”
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