Titled a serpentine, LANZA atelier’s Pavilion will be unveiled to the public at Serpentine South on 6 June 2026 with Goldman Sachs supporting the annual project for the 12th consecutive year. As the Pavilion reaches its 25th edition, Serpentine will celebrate this landmark anniversary through a special partnership with the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

Throughout its history, the Serpentine Pavilion has grown into a highly anticipated showcase for emerging talents. The Pavilion has evolved over the years as a participatory public and artistic platform for Serpentine’s experimental, interdisciplinary, community and education programmes.

LANZA atelier, founded in 2015 by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, is a Mexico City-based architecture studio. Their collaborative practice is rooted in the everyday and the informal, attentive to how technology, craft, and spatial intelligence emerge in unexpected conditions. Their work locates beauty in use, assembly, and encounter, proposing ways of building that foreground dialogue and collective experience.

The duo places particular emphasis on hands-on design methods such as drawing and model-making, treating them as active tools for thinking through material, form, and structure. Working globally, the studio understands architectural practice as one that moves fluidly across cultural spaces, residential projects, public infrastructure, and furniture design, through a critical and engaged perspective.

For this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, LANZA atelier took its inspiration from the English architecture feature known as a serpentine or crinkle-crankle wall which forms one side of the pavilion. This type of brick wall, composed of alternating curves, originated in ancient Egypt and was later introduced to England  by Dutch engineers. Its curvilinear form provides stability through lateral support, meaning the one-brick-wide serpentine wall requires fewer bricks than a straight wall. The eponymous feature also subtly nods to the nearby Serpentine lake, named for its gentle curvature, evoking the form of a serpent.

In dialogue with the surrounding landscape, a second wall works in harmony with the tree canopy without disrupting it, while the main structure is positioned on the Northern side of the site. A translucent roof rests lightly on brick columns evoking a grove of trees. The pavilion’s configuration allows light and air to permeate the space, softening the boundary between enclosure and openness.

LANZA atelier chose brick as the primary material to celebrate the distinctly English garden tradition and establish a conversation with the existing brick façade of the Serpentine South Gallery, once a tea pavilion itself. Constructed from a rhythmic repetition of brick columns that transform the wall from opaque to permeable, the Pavilion becomes a metaphorical bridge between the geographies of Europe and the Americas. 

LANZA atelier said: “It is an honour to be selected as the architects of the 25th Serpentine Pavilion, a milestone year for the commission. We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to share our work with a wider public and to contribute to the Pavilion’s ongoing legacy of spatial experimentation and collective encounter. Set within a garden, an evocation of the natural world, the project takes the form of a serpentine wall, conceived as a device that both reveals and withholds: shaping movement, modulating rhythm, and framing thresholds of proximity, orientation, and pause.

Inspired by the figure of the serpent as a generative and protective force, we draw a parallel with England’s winding fruit walls, which are structures that temper climate, create shelter, and enable growth. From this idea emerges a pavilion built of simple clay brick, foregrounding vernacular craft and the elemental capacity of architecture to bring people together. The 2026 Pavilion proposes built forms that are permeable, shaped and held by a gentle geometry, and continually responsive to those who move through it.”

Throughout the Summer and until October, the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 will become a platform for Serpentine’s live and events programme, providing encounters in music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion and technology. Each year’s commission respond to the unique architecture of the Pavilion, inviting audiences to experience the activated space. 

In 2026, Serpentine will collaborate with the Zaha Hadid Foundation to commemorate Zaha Hadid’s legacy and mark the 25th Serpentine Pavilion. A dedicated programme on architecture will take place at Serpentine South. As the architect of the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion in 2000, Hadid’s spirit of innovation has set the tone for what has since become one of the world’s most influential architectural commissions. This approach continues to shape not only the Pavilion series, but also Serpentine’s wider programme of exhibitions and live events.

The programme will aim to explore Hadid’s groundbreaking contributions to the field while connecting new and wider audiences with innovative architectural conversations. Bringing together leading architects, thinkers, and cultural practitioners, it will foster transnational and transgenerational architectural dialogue, inviting former Pavilion architects to explore questions at the forefront of architecture today, reflecting on Zaha Hadid’s career and the legacy of the Pavilion whilst looking ahead to the possibilities of the future.

Serpentine will publish LANZA atelier’s first monograph to accompany the Pavilion. Designed by Estudio Herrera, it will bring together new and insightful contributions from the fields of architecture, art and poetry. Generously illustrated in colour, it also features an extensive conversation between LANZA atelier and Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist and an essay by José Esparza Chong Cuy.

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Images: Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo of LANZA atelier. Photo: © Pia Riverola and Serpentine Pavilion 2026 a serpentine, designed by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, LANZA atelier. Design render, aerial view. © LANZA atelier. Courtesy Serpentine.