Serpentine Pavilion 2026: Why LANZA Built It From Brick
Isabel Abascal of LANZA atelier on crinkle-crankle walls, 10,000 years of architecture, and a pavilion designed to be taken apart
The 25th Serpentine Pavilion opened to press this morning in Kensington Gardens. Titled ‘a serpentine’, it was designed by the Mexico City studio LANZA atelier — founders Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo — only the second Mexican practice to receive the commission, after Frida Escobedo in 2018. The structure takes its logic from the crinkle-crankle wall: a single-brick-thick wall whose alternating curves give it stability while using less material than a straight one. From a distance the walls read as solid; up close, they turn out to be permeable. I spoke with Isabel at the preview about why a studio would build a temporary pavilion out of one of the oldest and most permanent materials we have.
You can see straight through the brickwork — it’s permeable — and gathering and community clearly sit at the centre of the design. But serpentine walls also carry a history of fortification, and they predate England, going back to ancient Egypt. Was that history part of how you approached this?
We think a lot of the answers to our present climate and social crises lie in vernacular ways of building. So we’re very respectful of ancient construction methods — though we always try to give them a twist and make them contemporary. We love learning from what’s been done for millennia.
Brick has been used for maybe 10,000 years. It was the main material humanity’s first cities were built from, in Mesopotamia. There are records of serpentine walls in ancient Egypt, but they may have been used even earlier. We know they were brought to the UK by Dutch engineers, who had a practice of reclaiming land from the sea — they’d settle along the coast in Suffolk. When the brick tax was imposed at the end of the 18th century, people looked for ways to use as few bricks as possible. And to us it’s amazing that, through the intelligence of the geometry, an undulating wall can do exactly that.
So to me, everything is full of connections. You mention the royal park — we’re very aware that a garden is not the natural world. It’s an allegory for it, an invocation of it. And I’m conscious that this isn’t a crinkle-crankle wall either, but an invocation of one. That matters to us, because through allegory you can hold several meanings at once. That’s what we’re trying to do, subtly, through architecture: to gesture toward broader social questions, and toward a more connected world.
The gaps you look out through also recall the slits archers once fired through at the palaces nearby — symbols of war and of empire. Was that tension, between war and community, something you were thinking about?
For us, architecture should be something you navigate and discover step by step. We love that from afar you read these walls as opaque, almost massive — and then as you get closer you realise they’re actually permeable. There’s a moment of discovery there that I find poetic and beautiful, and that anyone can feel, whether they’re a child or an adult.
It comes from the construction method. If you look at the columns, it’s the same element repeated throughout the whole pavilion — the walls are really one column after another. For us it’s also an evocation of the cactus fences in Oaxaca, in Mexico, traditionally planted to divide plots of land: cactus after cactus, until you’ve drawn a boundary.
Last question. Why build with brick — a material famous for its durability — for something temporary, and then crown it with a roof that recalls a tarp or a marquee?
We believe brick has real endurance. Laying it without mortar is deliberate: it means the pavilion can be disassembled and shipped to a second life, even though it’s only here for a season. And for the roof, we needed something very light — something that could work as a lantern at night, filtering the light. It’s the counterpoint to the floor and the brick below, which reads as a heavy platform, a kind of tray. Against that weight, we wanted the roof to feel almost weightless.
‘a serpentine’ is on view at Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, from 6 June to 25 October 2026, with a programme of talks, performances, screenings and family events running throughout the summer.