The English countryside has always known a secret about walls: the curved ones stand with fewer bricks. The crinkle-crankle — that serpentine garden wall whose undulation is its structure — is an old thrift dressed as charm. This summer in Kensington Gardens, Mexico City's LANZA atelier has taken that secret and built a pavilion out of it.
a serpentine, free from 6 June to 25 October 2026, is the annual Serpentine commission by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo. The name is a triple pun carefully earned: the gallery that commissions it, the lake that shares the park, and the wall type that holds the south elevation. Beauty, here, is not applied after the engineering. Beauty is the engineering.
Brick as a conversation with the park
LANZA chose brick deliberately — English garden tradition, and a quiet nod to the original Serpentine South Gallery, once a tea pavilion in the same material. The south wall undulates for stability and needs less masonry than a straight run; the north curves around the existing tree canopy; columns in brick read as a grove rather than a colonnade. A translucent roof lets light and weather through, so the boundary between inside and park never quite hardens. You are never sure whether you have entered a building or simply walked deeper into the garden's grammar. Photographs by Iwan Baan, released at the opening, catch that ambiguity: walls that behave like hedges, roofs that behave like shade.
The Pavilion is built from a rhythmic repetition of brick that transforms the wall from opaque to permeable. That is the whole architectural idea, stated without a manifesto panel. Structure becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes a place to sit.
A studio that declared beauty out loud
Abascal and Arienzo founded LANZA in 2015 with a phrase that would sound naive in a grant application and exact in a manifesto: to make meaningful contributions to the beauty of the world. The Architectural League of New York, naming them Emerging Voices in 2023, heard inventiveness and compositional refinement across scales. Their work has already sat in SFMOMA's collection; this year they also design the Pavilion of Kosovo at the Venice Biennale. The Serpentine commission is that claim at civic scale — temporary, free, and serious about the idea that a wall can be both thrifty and ravishing.
Selection was made by Bettina Korek, Hans Ulrich Obrist and the Serpentine team with advisor Sou Fujimoto. The continuity with earlier pavilions is not stylistic. It is the annual wager that architecture, given four months and a lawn, can still make a public argument.
What a summer pavilion is for
Every Serpentine Pavilion is a short lease on the question of what architecture owes us when it is allowed to be slight. LANZA's answer is almost classical: enclosure that still breathes, structure that still delights, a place to slow down without being told to. It belongs, for this magazine, with the objects we keep returning to — the shelf that makes a bicycle furniture, the designer who refuses mere decoration, the whole return of the considered hand. Through 25 October, the park has a new room. The wall that refuses to stand straight turns out to be the one that holds.