Architecture News

Marina Tabassum Selected to Design 2025 Serpentine Pavilion

London’s Serpentine Galleries has announced that Bangladeshi architect and educator Marina Tabassum and her Dhaka-based firm, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), have been selected to design this year's Serpentine Pavilion. Titled “A Capsule in Time,” it will be on view at Serpentine South at Kensington Gardens from June 6–October 26 and will host live cultural events and other activations.

MTA’s pavilion is inspired by, appropriately, park-going and garden canopies, as well as traditional Shamiyana tents and awnings found in South Asia. The open, wooden capsule-shaped structure is oriented around a central courtyard planted with a mature tree. With a facade clad in translucent material that diffuses and dapples sunlight, the pavilion features a movable arch form that allows for modifying the space.

Marina Tabassum. Photo © Asif Salman

“When conceiving our design, we reflected on the transient nature of the commission which appears to us as a capsule of memory and time,” Tabassum says. “The archaic volume of a half capsule, generated by geometry and wrapped in light semi-transparent material will create a play of filtered light that will pierce through the structure. The Serpentine Pavilion offers a unique platform under the summer sun to unite as people rich in diversity.”

Tabassum founded MTA in 2005 after a 10-year partnership with Bangladeshi architectural practice Urbana. The firm has completed socially, politically, and ecologically engaged projects around Bangladesh, with a focus on how architecture can address the needs of marginalized communities, evident in its modular Khudi Bari structures. It has also researched environmental degradation and other impacts of climate change. Tabassum’s work is described by Serpentine as seeking to “establish an architectural language that is contemporary while rooted and engaging with place, climate, context, culture and history.”

Exterior rendering of Marina Tabassum's 2025 Serpentine Pavilion, which will align with the bell tower of Serpentine South. Image © MTA, courtesy Serpentine

“A Capsule in Time’ will honor connections with the Earth and celebrate the spirit of community," says Serpentine’s chief executive Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist. “Tabassum’s design will bring the park inside the Pavilion. Its kinetic dimension will also harken back to the levitating element of Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond with Arup’s Serpentine Pavilion 2006.”

Tabassum’s temporary structure is the 25th entry in the Serpentine Pavilion program, which began in 2000 with a commission from Zaha Hadid. More recent architects and designers tapped for the program include South Korea’s Minsuk Cho, Lebanon-born Lina Ghotmeh, and Chicago’s Theaster Gates.

Exterior rendering of 2025 Serpentine Pavilion at Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, designed by Marina Tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Image © MTA, courtesy Serpentine

“The relationship between time and architecture is intriguing: between permanence and impermanence, of birth, age and ruin; architecture aspires to outlive time," Tabassum says. “Architecture becomes memories of the lived spaces continued through tales.”

“A Capsule in Time” will be the site for sharing those tales—and looking toward stories yet to be told.

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Dante A. Ciampaglia has two decades experience editing print and digital magazines, including at Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Time. He has been a contributor to Architectural Record for more than 10 years, writing about the intersection of architecture, film, and the visual arts. His work has also been published by the Washington Post, Paris Review, Wired, Los Angeles Review of Books, Metropolis, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others.