When the call came to design the Serpentine Pavilion—the high-profile annual commission for a temporary events space in London—Theaster Gates naturally thought of clay. For the polymathic Chicago-based artist, pottery is the foundation of an extraordinarily diverse practice, extending from painting and performance to urban regeneration. “I think through vessels,” he says, standing under the inky vault of a voluminous rotunda set before the Serpentine Gallery in leafy Kensington Gardens, “though this may be the largest I’ve ever made.”

Gates’s preoccupation with “vesselhood” is central to the project, whose contents are as important as the container. Entitled Black Chapel, the pavilion is intended to evoke the qualities of sacred spaces, with live events reflecting the importance of spiritual art and music to Gates’s own work. Ceramics also inspired the building’s cylindrical form, which alludes both to distinctive English bottle kilns and more hallowed structures—circular Roman temples and African tombs.