This year's Serpentine Pavilion, inspired by London's immigrant gathering spaces, opens a year later than planned

2021-06-10T18:41:00-04:00

The latest iteration of the Serpentine Pavilion is now open in London after more than a year of COVID-related delays.

South African studio Counterspace had to wait 10 months to present its final design after being named to the commission in February of 2020.

Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Exterior View © Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan

The women-led team completed the commission's 20th Pavilion using repurposed materials including wine corks, steel, and cement leftover from marble production. This culminated in a carbon-negative building six meters in height that brought together elements from the city’s disparate migrant enclaves in an amalgam of typologies meant to articulate different scales of intimacy, according to Counterspace’s founder Sumayya Vally.

Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Interior View © Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan

To gain perspective for the structure, Vally spent four months in the city looking for gathering spaces that typifi...

Serpentine will not host a pavilion this year due to COVID-19

2020-04-24T12:39:00-04:00

For the first time since the annual program was founded, Serpentine Galleries will not host the 2020 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace this summer. The commission has now been extended into a two-year endeavor in which the practice will collaborate with the Serpentine on a series of off-site and online research projects through the rest of this year. The culmination of this new project will resolve with the opening of the Pavilion in the summer of 2021.

Sir David Adjaye, a Serpentine Galleries trustee and Serpentine Pavilion Advisor said, "The global COVID-19 crisis has changed the immediate context. Rather than rush to execute Counterspace's stellar design as soon as it is safe to do so, the Serpentine has chosen to accept the slowness reshaping society today and utilize it to develop a deeper relationship with the architects."

Amina Kaskar, Sumayya Vally and Sarah de Villiers of Counterspace. Photographed by Justice Mukheli in Johannesburg, 2...

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This year's Serpentine Pavilion, inspired by London's immigrant gathering spaces, opens a year later than planned

Serpentine will not host a pavilion this year due to COVID-19