This year’s Serpentine Pavilion is extravagant and impressive — but where’s the fun?

Twenty-five years ago, Zaha Hadid designed a tent outside the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens. Its white fabric roof was folded into a geometry of irregular triangles, swooping and lifting. It was quite a modest thing, a one-off commission for an acclaimed architect who had at that time, almost unbelievably, never built anything in her adopted home city. That tent would become the first iteration of an annual programme that has become a highly anticipated summer moment and, looking at this year’s contribution, one which has continued to grow in scale, ambition, expense and expectation. This year’s Serpentine Pavilion comes in the form of a large hangar of a structure designed, in a neat symmetry, by another brilliant woman architect from a Muslim country, Marina Tabassum.

Source: This year’s Serpentine Pavilion is extravagant and impressive — but where’s the fun?