Marina Tabassum’s 2025 Serpentine Pavilion Opens at Kensington Gardens
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The 2025 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Bangladeshi architect and educator Marina Tabassum and her firm, Marina Tabassum Architects, opens to the public in London this weekend. Named A Capsule in Time, it is the 25th structure in a series that began with a Zaha Hadid creation in 2000. With a monumentality that suits the milestone anniversary, Tabassum’s charming pavilion is composed of two half domes and two arches, arranged in the form of a capsule. Although a substantial piece of architecture—it is 24 feet tall and 36 feet wide at its widest point—her work manages the neat trick of also being an ephemeral, fun object for hosting summer events in the parkland setting of Kensington Gardens.
Serpentine Pavilion 2025, A Capsule in Time, designed by Marina Tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Photo Iwan Baan, courtesy Serpentine
The pavilion is constructed from glue-laminated timber arches, with lateral steel members, so it is not dwarfed by the Serpentine Gallery behind. Any formality, however, is mediated by inflected panels of polycarbonate, which are angled over the surface so light cast to the interior varies in color and tone. It is also cheekily divided to make room for a single Gingko tree, which stands on an axis with the bell tower of the 1930s-era Gallery building behind; a means of allowing the natural world to inhabit the more formal architectural one. The interior interior of the pavilion is lined with a rim of seating on top of low bookshelves.
Serpentine Pavilion 2025, A Capsule in Time, designed by Marina Tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Photo Iwan Baan, courtesy Serpentine
In many ways, Tabassum is the perfect designer of a Serpentine Pavilion. Since the late 2010s, the Serpentine Gallery has looked beyond Europe, the United States, and Japan for talented architects it can help launch to global stardom, earning some reflected glory, Sumayya Vally (2021) and Lina Ghotmeh (2023) are perfect examples. Tabassum, based in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, has the added benefit of already proving herself to be a highly talented, if not prolific, architect. Her best-known work until now was the intriguing Bait Ur Rouf Jame Mosque in Dhaka, for which she won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016. That project negotiates in a clever geometric plan between a sacred space orientated toward Mecca and the divergent street grid of a new urban district. The Museum of Independence, also in Dhaka, is another humane, yet formal space: a subterranean structure dominated by a circular pool and adorned with a simple glass obelisk.
Serpentine Pavilion 2025, A Capsule in Time, designed by Marina Tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Photo Iwan Baan, courtesy Serpentine
In addition to creating monumental set pieces for her home nation, though, more recently Tabassum has done extensive research work on temporary structures, albeit for a clearer social purpose than the Serpentine Pavilion. Using money from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, she worked in the Ganges Delta with itinerant communities that are compelled to move to escape flooding but also must stay close to fishing grounds for their livelihoods. For them, she created a modular structure with a spaceframe made of bamboo supports and steel connectors. With only a shallow foundation—a requirement of the Serpentine Pavillion as well— it can be disassembled in three hours by a team of three to five people. (Vitra bought one for its campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 2024.)
Interior views of Serpentine Pavilion 2025, A Capsule in Time, designed by Marina Tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Photo Iwan Baan, courtesy Serpentine
Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion is both adaptable (the northern two sections can be moved together to create a single structure) and will itself be demounted and rebuilt elsewhere, although this next home is not yet decided upon. Previous Serpentine Pavilions have been bought by private collectors or cultural organizations around the world for different purposes. Frank Gehry’s 2008 pavilion, for example, sits in a French vineyard owned by an Irish property developer. On the market now is Tabassum’s building, which outstrips many of its predecessors for its presence, charm, and geometric grace.
