Reactions in the UK are pouring in after the opening week of Lina Ghotmeh's 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens.

The annual installation’s 22nd overall edition features the Lebanese-born Parisian designers palm leaf-shaped timber À table pavilion, which encases a café and communal dining table that references Malian Toguna huts while "inviting us to convene, sit down, think, share, and celebrate exchanges." 

Oliver Wainwright got the press’ first crack on June 5, calling it a “symphony of timber” and “one of the most modest, low-lying pavilions of the programme so far" before complimenting its delicate site-responsiveness and the apparent lightness of its materials. “From the aerial vantage point of a drone, it is an elegant sight. It floats like a paper parasol, unfurled in a clearing between the trees, its sharply creased zigzag roof making it look as if it could be folded up and carried off at any minute,” he wrote. “It conjures all the metaphors of palm leaves and tree structures that Ghotmeh is fond of reaching for, with the extra party vibes of a cocktail umbrella.”

He also said its system of plywood panels “sadly give the building the look of a clumsy piece of flat-pack furniture, with the twee style of something you might find on Etsy.” 

Echoing his countryman’s fondness for its airy, umbrella-like form and “convivial” detailing, The Financial Times’ Edwin Heathcote quipped that it offers a “mining of the mind rather than the earth” before comparing it favorably to Herzog & de Meuron’s 2012 pavilion collaboration with Ai Weiwei.  “Despite all those references," he continued, "the structure itself is surprisingly simple and unstarry, a relief after some of the complexities and machinations of previous designs.”

Offering perhaps a more sober take, the Architectural Record's Tim Abrahams wrote: “This is not the best-detailed pavilion of recent years, but it has a purpose and sense of conviviality that many others have lacked [...] This pavilion has few overt formal gestures, but it is beautifully proportioned and there is a clever rhythm to its structure."

Moving over to the less favorable side, The Evening-Standard’s Robert Bevan said it was a “bland dish” that calls into question whether the commission itself has become a bit staid. As he writes: "Ghotmeh would get five stars if well-mannered and fully realised architecture was the sole measure of pavilion success. But its beige credibility comes at the cost of experimentality. Wasn’t this programme supposed to be about design innovation, giving us glimpses of what the architectural could do? On that criteria, zero stars might be more fitting."

Writing in The Times Bevan’s colleague Laura Freeman called it “a pretty but flimsy effort” (although the article is paywalled).

The ArtReview’s Ruby Tandoh offered an even more comprehensive takedown of its well-caffeinated wooden aftertaste, asking if the incorporation of sponsor Benugo – a staple of the country’s museum and gallery industries – diminished the connective premise of its central metaphor. 

As she claims: "The trouble is that this space performs the role of peacekeeper a little too well: the café has suffused the pavilion with its own relentlessly inoffensive vibes. The pavilion ought to be an architecturally significant work reluctantly incorporating a Benugo. Instead, it has become a Benugo reluctantly incorporating an architecturally significant work [...] in the absence of a genuinely directive approach to communal dining," Tandoh writes finally, "it is animated by little more than the commercial interests of the Benugo it houses. [...]  À table feels less like the imperative of the original French and more like an observation: a table, or twenty-five, in a big round room."

Backtracking to where we began, the Guardian’s Rowan Moore finally said that the pavilion is felled by a "disconnect [...] between the symbolic ambitions of the architecture and its lived reality." Moore continued, "Ghotmeh is a remarkable architect, but this is a not-quite-remarkable building, for reasons inherent in the Serpentine’s commission. [...]  If Ghotmeh’s building were permanent and useful – let’s say as a cafe or restaurant; if its details were less compromised, and if there were less glare of expectation, it would be rightly celebrated as a delightful place to eat and meet."

The pavilion runs through October 29th in Kensington Gardens. A look back at previous pavilions like Theaster Gates' in 2022, Counterspace's 2020 pavilion, and others can be found here.