London’s Serpentine Galleries has announced the recipient of the 22nd pavilion commission is Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh, whose structure will occupy the gardens of Serpentine South from June 2023.
Since 2000, from June to October each year, the pavilion commission has celebrated the best in architectural experimentation from practitioners around the globe in Kensington Gardens. It has become a highly anticipated showcase for emerging international talent and a highlight in London’s summer cultural calendar.
Titled À table, Ghotmeh’s pavilion will explore notions of memory, space and landscape through a structure that alludes to the the activities of interaction and unity through an organic design inspired by a dining table.
“À table is an invitation to dwell together, in the same space and around the same table,” said Ghotmeh. “It is an encouragement to enter into a dialogue, to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and the Earth.”
The pavilion will be built using sustainably sourced and low-carbon materials, incorporating timber ribs arranged like a skeleton to support a suspended pleated roof. “Echoing the structures of tree leaves, the Pavilion embraces the nature of the park in which it emerges,” Ghotmeh added.
The commission has been designed to be easily disassembled and reassembled, permitting it to be redeployed at other locations beyond its life on the Serpentine site.
Ghotmeh’s work is at the “crossroads of architecture, art and design”, a spokesperson for Serpentine said, and her projects include the Estonian National Museum; “Stone Garden”, a craft tower and gallery space in Beirut; “Réalimenter Masséna” wooden tower in Paris, to name a few.
Serpentine chief executive Bettina Korek and artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist said Ghotmeh’s pavilion draws on the natural elements of its surrounds, while furthering Serpentine’s mission to create connections between architecture and society by “promoting unity and togetherness” in its form and function.
The Serpentine pavilion commission was first pioneered by Dame Zaha Hadid in 2000. Previous commissions have included “Black Chapel” by Theaster Gates (2022), the 2020 pavilion by Counterspace, and 2019’s mysterious canopy by Junya Ishigami.
