The Brooklyn Rail

Designed by Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), the Dhaka-based firm led by the eponymous Bangladeshi architect, this year’s Serpentine Pavilion is now open, but always, delicately, closing. Marking the twenty-fifth year of the annual commission in London’s Hyde Park, A Capsule in Time is composed of a long semi-cylindrical form spanning 55 meters, divided in four segments to allow for multiple entrances and views through to the surrounding Kensington Gardens. One of the two central timber segments is mounted on a concealed rail, allowing it to creep laterally and close, reconfiguring half of the pavilion into a continuous enclosed volume.

The pavilion marks Tabassum’s first built work outside Bangladesh, and the question becomes: how do you carry a culturally and climatically responsive practice and ask it to act in the middle of Hyde Park? Tabassum cites temporality as her through line. In Bangladesh, her modular Khudi Bari homes can be assembled and disassembled as needed to respond to the needs of climate refugees in flood-prone delta plains. The tortured dance of sand beds and flash floods means the land constantly erodes and re-surfaces, begetting an architectural approach that must move as its people do. Here, too, Tabassum makes a physical commitment to the shifting of things, however slowly or symbolically. Hers is the first pavilion to move horizontally (Rem Koolhaas’s moved vertically), and the gesture is modest.

At the heart of the pavilion is a Ginkgo tree, its tallest branch aligning satisfyingly with the top of the pavilion. This climate resilient tree—whose leaves turn from green to a brilliant yellow in autumn—echoes the seasonal rhythms of the park and will be replanted after the pavilion closes in October in a gesture of continuity. It’s a subtle poetry, the inevitability of change becoming one of the only constants in the project. The tree’s natural decay becomes a kind of stopwatch, a timekeeper for the compulsory disassembly that is to come.

Each arched section of the pavilion holds oscillating tiles of colored polycarbonate, secured in steel frames. These create a tessellation of translucency that softly diffuses light throughout the pavilion. Even on a cloudy day, the atmosphere shifts: the grey of London warmed into a gracious dissolve. This sense of dynamism is central to the work of Marina Tabassum Architects, whose practice is pointedly rooted in the spatial context of Bangladesh and guided by the adaptability required in a climate-vulnerable, subtropical nation.

Still, this year’s pavilion invites you to linger. It reads as larger than recent editions, where Lina Ghotmeh’s felt like an intimate circle for gathering, Minsuk Cho’s like a constellation of discrete spaces, and Theaster Gates and David Adjaye’s a largely enclosed contemplative vessel. Tabassum’s is at once cohesive and expansive: a complete “capsule” of space that feels generous rather than enclosed—open and unreserved. This generosity extends to how the pavilion can be activated. Each section is trimmed by wooden benches fitted with cubby holes underneath. I’m reminded of the institutional architecture of schools, where objects are constantly secured into neat rectangular spaces. Here, the effect is more personal. You can sit, store your things, pause, and stay. The pavilion’s considerable scale allows for a slowness that quietly counters the temporary nature of the work. Each visit becomes a moment to dwell, to enjoy it before it’s gone.

As is now almost customary for such exhibitions, Tabassum and her studio have curated a selection of books, cleverly housed in a shelf built into the structure itself. Titles include The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, a banker, pioneer of micro-credit and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner. The selection is meant as a celebration of Bengali history, literature, and ecology, and includes some titles that are banned in Bangladesh. Unlike traditional exhibitions that often prompt a continuous circulation through the space, meaning any book selections are often just for show, the form of this pavilion invites the stillness required to take in the offering. I picked up a copy of R. K. Narayan’s The Guide and found an old library sticker in its front cover. It was an accidental trace of intimacy in a space you can otherwise make your own.

Tabassum received the commission in October 2024, during a period of political unrest following the ousting of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, just months earlier. The timing made it impossible to ignore her local condition, not just its fragility under political duress, but also its growing vulnerability in the face of climate change. In response, she envisioned the pavilion as a kind of retreat, a space for pause and respite. The architect references the Shamiyana, a large temporary canopy common in South Asia, made by suspending various patterned fabrics with bamboo poles. While the parallels are mostly obtuse, both are modular, responsive to light and shadow, and gather people within a shared spatial and cultural envelope.

Anniversaries tend to lend meaning where none might otherwise arise, but the pavilion’s twenty-fifth year arrives at a moment when architecture’s responsibilities feel especially urgent. Amidst the converging crises of forced displacement, climate migration, and political instability, what can the Serpentine Pavilion really offer that might outlast its brief tenure? By definition, pavilions are temporary, flexible, and adaptable. But they are also stages: opportunities to distill an enduring architectural philosophy into a fleeting form. In that sense, Tabassum’s Dhaka-based practice is a deeply appropriate choice and a fitting interlocutor. Her work is rooted in the temporal, shaped both by the immediacy of need and a long arc of care. The choice to title the pavilion A Capsule in Time and not A Time Capsule is telling. Tabassum recognizes the form as one chosen iteration for the present juncture, rather than an authoritative paragon of our contemporary moment. Her pavilion does not just just embody impermanence; it insists on its value. It’s hard not to admire that.