For London’s Serpentine Galleries, 2025 marks the 25th edition of an annual commission that never fails to capture the global architectural imagination. Since 2000, when Zaha Hadid unveiled the inaugural installation, the Serpentine Pavilion has showcased the work of an internationally acclaimed designer — one without a completed building in England. In the quarter century since, a who’s who of architects have left their mark on the , ranging from Toyo Ito and Frank Gehry to Diébédo Francis Kéré, , Frida Escobedo, and , to name just a few. This year, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum is set to bring her distinctive design philosophy to London.
Named A Capsule in Time, Tabassum’s pavilion will be on display at the Serpentine South’s lawn beginning on June 6, and will remain on show until October 26, 2025. Previewed in a set of newly released renderings, the design is in part a meditation on the fleeting nature of a temporary installation. “When conceiving our design, we reflected on the transient nature of the commission which appears to us as a capsule of memory and time,” says Tabassum, who leads the eponymous firm Marina Tabassum Architects (). “The relationship between time and architecture is intriguing: between permanence and impermanence, of birth, age and ruin; architecture aspires to outlive time.”
Comprising a series of four translucent wooden capsules, the pill-form pavilion is arranged in a north-south orientation. A pair of rounded bookends and two mobile central forms, which can be reconfigured along the north-south axis to move with the changing light. Inviting a delicate interplay of light and shadow, the kinetic design draws on the Bengali vernacular of Shamiyana tents and awnings — temporary, ethereal structures erected atop bamboo poles to create a sheltered indoor-outdoor space for gatherings and celebrations. As Tabassum puts it, “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 as if under a Shamiyana at a Bengali wedding.”
For Tabassum, the deft integration of . “In the Bengal delta, architecture is ephemeral as dwellings change locations with the rivers shifting courses. Architecture becomes memories of the lived spaces continued through tales.” In London, another chapter of the story is about to be told.
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