“The pavilion is assembled by gravity,” says Alessandro Arienzo of Lanza Atelier, one half of the Mexican architect duo behind this year’s Serpentine Pavilion. Gesturing with his hands, he adds, “because if you flip it upside down, all the pieces will just fall out.”

It’s the first time bricks have been used to construct the Serpentine Galleries’ summer attraction — and the material is so ordinary and ubiquitous in the fabric of London, the city that hosts the annual commission, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Each year, a team led by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine’s artistic director, selects a notable architect to build an experimental structure on the lawn beside the former teahouse in Kensington Gardens. The legacy beyond its first life as a pavilion must be central to the design. And the structure has to be fully demountable, which — in the case of Lanza Atelier’s 2026 creation — meant the bricks had to be assembled without mortar.

“We always choose material that is closest to the site,” Arienzo says, as we look down at the pavilion from the gallery rooftop. The structure has been offset to create an open green space beside it, through which a brick bench snakes. The pavilion is called, pointedly, a serpentine. Bricks were manufactured specifically for the project at the Wienerberger factory in Surrey, Australia. Floor tiles, also made of brick, spill out from the curving wall and march towards the gallery. On a rare sunny day, their shadow curls after them.

The sinuous wall references the English crinkle-crankle wall, a brick typology found mainly in rural Suffolk. Dating back to the mid-18th century, these undulating garden walls protected crops from harsh winds while also creating partial shade that encouraged biodiversity. Their sinuous form also allowed them to stand with fewer bricks and without buttresses.

Although Arienzo jokes that a child could have built the pavilion, there is more to its structure than simply stacking building blocks onto steel rods. “The bricks are bolted down from the top and compressed together,” explains Jo Leach, director at AECOM, which has realized the visions of Serpentine architects since 2013. “It was quite challenging to do because everything had to line up perfectly.” Thin horizontal metal plates with a soft joint have been inserted midway up the 3.5-metre walls. “This ensures that bricks are aligned and they don’t break.”

The steel plates match the width of a standard UK brick (10 centimetres) and carefully trace the wall’s curves. Painted to match the red brickwork, the engineering all but disappears. The rods are secured into below-ground concrete blocks, “recycled,” Leach notes, “from previous incarnations.”

In an era when digital renderings often outshine the finished building, this year’s pavilion is better in person, thanks to the care taken in its detailing. Up close, the walls reveal regular gaps between the bricks, creating what the architects describe as “moments of connection” rather than division. The raised roof allows air to move freely through the pavilion; its steel grid has been designed so that fabric shades could be “threaded through,” Leach explains, while its lightweight polycarbonate sheets render the structure light enough that the brick columns need only be a single brick thick — as specified by Lanza Atelier to maintain the same sense of permeability as the surrounding walls.

There is an obligatory café tucked into one corner, while a clock gifted by sponsor Rolex hangs awkwardly against the brickwork. Seating designed by Lanza Atelier is scattered throughout; the studio’s “Chairs for 4 Couples” are deliberately unfixed. Some have been pushed together to form a circle — “a spiral, in fact,” notes Isabel Abascal, the other half of Lanza Atelier. “People are free to move them and rearrange the furniture as they wish.”

Lanza Atelier approaches architecture holistically, moving fluidly between buildings, furniture, public art and exhibition design. One of its chair collections, created after the birth of the couple’s second child, varies in height to accommodate different ages and body sizes within the family. Abascal reflects, “I went to the accessible toilet inside Serpentine North with one of our sons the other day, and he was excited to see that he could reach the sink. He thought that it was designed just for him. He was so happy!” With the seriousness of an architect and the concern of a parent with young children, Arienzo adds, “You know, we don’t think enough about children when we design.”

Their pavilion is among the most playful to occupy the Serpentine lawn in recent years. The outdoor brick bench seems destined to become a playground in itself, while the openings in the walls invite games of peekaboo. Abascal says, “We like it when we no longer have the language to describe what it is — is it a chair or a table…?” The firm’s ability to move between disciplines recalls the symbolism of the snake in Mesoamerican cosmology, which, they explain, is a creative force connecting heaven and earth.

The following day, I ask Obrist if it’s typical that two foreign architects should take an interest in something so distinctly English and give it renewed meaning. In response, he points to a small blue book on the table, Obrist’s own Archipelago, containing conversations with the late French philosopher Édouard Glissant, and says, “This idea of connecting local and global, that was very much in Glissant’s thinking. I think that’s increasingly important in this polarized world.” In Archipelago, Obrist notes that Glissant foresaw both globalization and the nationalist backlash against it as early as the 1960s. The philosopher imagined “Tout-Mond,” One World, where all cultures could come into contact, listen to one another, and influence each other. It was a form of globalization that resisted homogenization. In fact, in the book Glissant puts forth that “it is our duty to preserve multiplicity.”

Obrist points out that another Mexican architect, Frida Escobedo, designed the 2018 pavilion using roof tiles to create celosía lattice walls, a familiar element of Mexican domestic architecture, while also referencing the Prime Meridian established at Greenwich in 1851. Another example, he suggests, of Glissant’s idea that “all is entangled.” 

Through its conceptual clarity, lightness and economy of means, this year’s pavilion also shares something with the lineage of Japanese architects who have occupied the Serpentine lawn: Toyo Ito in 2002, SANAA in 2009, Sou Fujimoto in 2013 and Junya Ishigami in 2019. Abascal herself interned at SANAA nearly two decades ago. With its pavilion, SANAA effectively dissolved the walls altogether; the next year, Kazuyo Sejima chose “People Meet in Architecture” as the theme of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. The sentiment resonates here too: Lanza Atelier describes its pavilion simply as a place for people to come together.

Standing inside it, Glissant’s convivial vision of coexistence suddenly feels less abstract. Yet questions linger about what happens when the pavilion moves to Qatar for its second life. A wall, however elegant, carries different meanings there. Inside the pavilion, meanwhile, the Rolex clock keeps ticking.

Lanza Atelier’s Serpentine Pavilion is open to the public until 25 October 2026.