Standing beneath the soaring dome of her design, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum tells the assembled audience that “It takes a village to make architecture work and happen.” A twist, of course, on the familiar saying: it takes a village to raise a child. “I’ll only take 20 per cent of the credit,” she adds. “The rest belongs to everyone else involved.”
Her pavilion, A Capsule in Time, evokes childhood memories of Shamiyanas, makeshift tents of bamboo and brightly patterned cloth used for large gatherings. Yet that vision shifted. “I originally wanted to use jute,” she explains, “but it had to be waterproof and durable for its afterlife.”
Jute gave way to tinted polycarbonate panels, which zigzag down like a waterfall. These refract sunlight but stay rigid, unlike fluttering fabric. All parts were prefabricated off-site and assembled using dry construction with bolts and screws. Glulam arches support dual vaulted canopies and two semi domes. Shelving is built into the walls, useful if the pavilion becomes a library, as Tabassum hopes.
The resulting structure is nearly five meters high, with 275 square metres of interior space, larger than a doubles tennis court. A moving section expands to welcome more visitors, though shifting it indeed takes a village.
The arches are painted dark brown, resembling the bark of a Ginkgo tree. “A climate resilient species from the Jurassic period,” notes Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist. A Ginkgo has been planted at the centre, aligned with the view of Serpentine South, a former tea pavilion by James Grey West, built in 1934.
Although minimal and elegant, Tabassum’s pavilion may feel slightly overproduced. Still, it offers a cascade of multicoloured light, a breezy interior, a scattering of books, and benches lining the edge. The mandatory café sits discreetly at one end.
Despite its origins, the final structure arguably has more in common with Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, or his unbuilt Mansion House Square scheme — once called a “giant glass stump” by then-Prince Charles — than with a festive tent. It also recalls Jean Nouvel’s brown-clad One New Change, with its bright red atrium, identical in hue to Nouvel’s 2010 Serpentine installation Red Sun Pavilion.
Is Tabassum reviving a trend? The comparison may seem unfair. Her pavilion is slimmer, more refined. But her international acclaim is catching up with the likes of Mies and Nouvel, though she has yet to build abroad by choice, keeping her Dhaka-based practice intentionally small.
It’s been 20 years since she founded Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). In that time, she has completed major public buildings like the Museum of Independence in Suhrawardy Udyan and the Aga Khan Award-winning Bait ur Rouf Mosque, a refuge as much as a place of worship. In 2024, she was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. She teaches at Delft University of Technology and has held posts at Yale, Harvard, the University of Toronto, and the Bengal Institute.
Though she hasn’t formally built overseas, in 2016 she created a full-scale mock-up of Khudi Bari (Tiny House) with AKT II for the Royal Academy of Arts. The bamboo structure, developed for Bangladesh’s landless population, had to be adapted for UK conditions. The project is now shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award, a possible second win for the architect.
Tabassum’s range spans both ephemeral and monumental. Her larger works echo Louis Kahn and Tadao Ando, with light playing on geometric forms. Her smaller ones are swift, cost-efficient, and locally sourced. Her Serpentine Pavilion merges both impulses, a rare feat.
What feels absent is her politics. Tabassum, in her statement, referenced 2024 as a year of global turmoil, intolerance, war, protests. “How can we transcend our differences and connect as humans?” she asks. Her hope is that the pavilion becomes a shared space under one roof, expanding tolerance and respect. A jute-covered capsule, or another Khudi Bari in the park, might have spoken more directly to her message. So what is the pavilion’s legacy? Is it, as Obrist noted, that it is “the first-ever pavilion that moves horizontally?” Is that enough?
The 8,000 kilometres between London and the Ganges delta — a landscape shaped by what Tabassum describes as “movement and impermanence” — may have been too far to bridge. Still, this year’s pavilion showcases an architect with rare maturity and a quiet ego. That, too, deserves praise.
Marina Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion is open until 26 October 2025 in London. Peter Cook’s Play Pavilion runs until 10 August. Yuki Sumner is a London-based writer and curator.
It Takes a Village to Build a Pavilion
Marina Tabassum channels South Asian ceremonial tents and modernist aesthetics at London’s Serpentine Galleries.