Marina Tabassum To Design Serpentine’s 2025 Pavilion

Marina Tabassum to Design Serpentine's 2025 Pavilion

The Serpentine has announced that Bangladeshi architect and educator Marina Tabassum and her firm, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), will design the 2025 Pavilion. Titled A Capsule in Time, the Pavilion will debut at Serpentine South on 6 June 2025.

Since its inception in 2000 with a groundbreaking design by Dame Zaha Hadid, the Serpentine Pavilion has become a celebrated platform for architectural innovation, offering emerging and established architects a chance to create their first UK structure. Over the years, the Pavilion has become more than just an architectural showcase—a vibrant space for community engagement, artistic experimentation, and interdisciplinary programming.

Marina Tabassum is widely known for her thoughtful and socially conscious approach to architecture. Her firm, Marina Tabassum Architects, has worked on projects across Bangladesh, prioritising social and environmental sustainability. One of their standout initiatives is the Khudi Bari (Small House) project, launched in 2020. These modular homes, designed for communities living on the shifting sandbanks of rivers in Bangladesh, can be easily dismantled and relocated—a practical response to the realities of climate change in one of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Marina Tabassum to Design Serpentine's 2025 Pavilion
Marina Tabassum to Design Serpentine’s 2025 Pavilion

Tabassum’s work reflects a deep commitment to addressing environmental degradation and improving living conditions for marginalised communities. This ethos aligns perfectly with the Serpentine Pavilion’s mission to foster meaningful conversations and connections through architecture and design.

Celebrated for her work that seeks to establish a contemporary architectural language while rooted in and engaging with place, climate, context, culture, and history, Tabassum’s design will resonate with Serpentine South and aims to prompt a dialogue between the commission’s permanent and ephemeral nature.

The 2025 Pavilion is elongated in the north-south direction and features a central court that aligns with Serpentine South’s bell tower. Inspired by the tradition of park-going and arched garden canopies that filter soft daylight through green foliage, the Pavilion’s sculptural quality is comprised of four wooden capsule forms with a translucent façade that diffuses and dapples light when infiltrating the space. A kinetic element is central to Tabassum’s design, where one of the capsule forms can move and connect, transforming the Pavilion into a new space.

Emphasising architecture’s sensory and spiritual possibilities through scale and the interplay of light and shadow, Tabassum’s design also draws on the history and architectural language of Shamiyana tents or awnings of South Asia. Similarly kinetic in their function, these structures are made up of an external fabric supported by bamboo poles and are commonly erected for outdoor gatherings and celebrations. The openness of Tabassum’s Pavilion welcomes the possibility of unifying visitors through conversations and connections, live programmes, and public convenings.

Marina Tabassum, Architect, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) said:

“We are thrilled to be selected as the architect of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion. When conceiving our design, we reflected on the commission’s transient nature, which appears to us as a capsule of memory and time. The relationship between time and architecture is intriguing: between permanence and impermanence, of birth, age and ruin; architecture aspires to outlive time. Architecture is a tool to live behind legacies, fulfilling the inherent human desire for continuity beyond life. In the Bengal delta, architecture is ephemeral as dwellings change locations with the rivers shifting courses. Architecture becomes memories of the lived spaces continued through tales. The archaic volume of a half capsule, generated by geometry and wrapped in light semi-transparent material, will create a play of filtered light that pours through the structure as if under a Shamiyana at a Bengali wedding. The Serpentine Pavilion offers a unique platform under the summer sun to unite as people rich in diversity. The stage is set, and the seats are placed. We envision various events and encounters in this versatile space that unifies people through conversations and connections.”

Bettina Korek, Chief Executive, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, said: “A Capsule in Time will honour connections with the Earth and celebrate the spirit of community. Tabassum’s design will bring the park inside the Pavilion, which is built around a mature tree at the centre of the structure. Its kinetic dimension will also harken back to the levitating element of Rem Koolhaas & Cecil Balmond with Arup’s Serpentine Pavilion 2006. We are grateful to all our loyal supporters who make this groundbreaking commission possible and look forward to announcing a full programme of live events and public programmes that will unite people around Tabassum’s visionary, spiritual and social structure. This is a milestone year for the Serpentine Pavilion Commission as we celebrate 25 years since the inception of this prestigious programme.”

Throughout the Summer and until October, the Serpentine Pavilion 2025 will become a platform for Serpentine’s live and events programme. It will feature Park Nights, the interdisciplinary platform for live encounters in music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion, and technology. Each year’s commissions respond to the Pavilion’s unique architecture, inviting audiences to experience the activated space.

Tabassum’s Pavilion will kickstart the 25th year of this historic commission and continue Dame Zaha Hadid’s ethos of pushing the boundaries of architecture. In her words, ‘There should be no end to experimentation’; Tabassum’s Pavilion will exemplify this credo. This year, Serpentine will host a programme of events to reflect on the commission, its history, and its future.

In June, Serpentine will publish a catalogue to accompany the Pavilion. Designed by Wolfe Hall, it will bring together new and insightful contributions from architecture, art and poetry. It is generously illustrated in colour throughout and features an extensive conversation between Marina Tabassum and Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Tabassum is a Professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She held the Norman Foster Chair at Yale University in 2023 and has taught as a visiting professor at numerous universities, including the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, USA; the University of Toronto, Canada; and BRAC University, Bangladesh. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and served as academic director at the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements between 2015 and 2021.

Tabassum’s pursuit of the ‘architecture of relevance’ has won her numerous awards, including the Soane Medal from the United Kingdom, the Arnold Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture, and the Jameel Prize from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016 for the Bait ur Rouf Mosque and has served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture from 2017 to 2022. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). In 2024, Tabassum was included in TIME Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People’.

Tabassum chairs the Executive Board of Prokritee, a fair-trade organisation that promotes crafts and provides livelihood to thousands of women artisans in Bangladesh. She is also the founding chairperson of the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (F.A.C.E), a non-profit organisation that focuses on climate adaptation and architecture’s agency and responsibility in providing dignified living conditions for marginalised populations. F.A.C.E is currently working with communities to build mobile modular housing (known as Khudi Bari) in various geographically and climatically challenged locations in Bangladesh.

Tabassum’s work is currently the subject of a travelling exhibition organised by Architektur Museum der TUM, Munich, showing in Lisbon and Delft. She has previously presented work at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (with Rana Begum, 2019), the Sharjah Architecture Triennale (2019), and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). , ArchiTangle, Harvard Graduate School of Design, ORO Editions, and Lars Müller Publishers have published her work

Founded in 2005, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) is an internationally recognised architecture and studio-based practice in Dhaka, Bangladesh. MTA began its journey to establish a language of architecture that is contemporary to the world yet rooted in a specific place. Standing against the global pressure of consumer architecture – a fast breed of buildings that are out of place and context – MTA is committed to rooting architecture in a place and is informed by climate and geography. Their work is well regarded as environmentally conscious, socially responsible and historically and culturally appropriate. Every project undertaken is a sensitive and relevant response to the uniqueness of individual sites, contexts, cultures and people.

Focusing on combining research and teaching, MTA invests in extensive research on the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, working closely with geographers, landscape architects, planners, and other allied professionals. Their work also extends to the marginalised low—to ultra-low-income population of the country, with a goal of elevating people’s environmental and living conditions.

Headed by principal architect Marina Tabassum, the studio engages talented architects and professionals interested in self-built projects who are willing to push conventional practice norms’ boundaries. The associate architects responsible for research, design, and management of individual projects work directly under the principal architect. The practice is consciously kept and retained at an optimum size, and projects undertaken are carefully chosen and limited in number per year.

MTA’s process-based practice model is well regarded as a Twenty-First Century model in the international architecture scene. As such, MTA has presented works and research to numerous institutions across Bangladesh and internationally. In 2016, MTA received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque – a building distinguished by its lack of popular mosque iconography, an emphasis on space and light and its capacity to function not only as a place of worship but also as a refuge for a dense neighbourhood on Dhaka’s periphery. The project was also listed among the top 25 postwar buildings of the world by New York Times.

Serpentine Pavilion, this pioneering commission began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid and presented the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture. The Pavilion was realised with the support of technical advisors at AECOM. In recent years, it has grown into a highly anticipated showcase for emerging talents, from Sumayya Vally, Counterspace (South Africa), the youngest architect to be commissioned, and Frida Escobedo (Mexico) to Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso) and Bjarke Ingels (Denmark). In 2022, Black Chapel was designed by Theaster Gates (USA); in 2023, À table was designed by Lina Ghotmeh (France and Lebanon) and in 2024, Archipelagic Void was developed by Minsuk Cho and his firm, Mass Studies (South Korea).

In 2021, the Pavilion programme evolved beyond its physical location for the first time and expanded with a series of Fragments placed across London. It also saw the launch of Support Structures for Support Structures, a fellowship programme initiated by Serpentine that supports up to ten artists and collectives working at the intersection of art, spatial politics, and community practice.

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