On the lawn beside the Serpentine South Gallery in London, Mexico City studio LANZA atelier builds a serpentine, a 2026 pavilion of red brick walls that bend rather than stand straight.
The 2026 Serpentine Pavilion photographed by Lorenzo Zandri takes its name twice over. From the lake whose curve gave the gallery its title, and from the English crinkle-crankle wall, a garden enclosure that wins its rigidity from waving rather than from mass. LANZA atelier, the Mexico City studio founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, treats the doubled reference as the project's whole argument. A wall that needs fewer bricks because it refuses to go straight.
Two long walls do most of the work. The south wall is the crinkle-crankle proper, a single thickness of red brick that snakes across the lawn and earns its stability from geometry rather than reinforcement. The north wall answers it, bending the other way to thread around an existing tree canopy. Together they enclose a room that has no corners and no obvious front, only a slow procession from the brick path that uncoils across the grass.
The brick itself is the loudest decision. LANZA stacks the units on edge, hollow faces outward, so the perforations read as a vertical weave across the surface. Up close the wall is a screen of small shadows. From the path it reads as a single ribbon of warm red, the same red as the Victorian facades of the Serpentine South Gallery, originally built as a tea pavilion. The pavement extends the gesture: brick laid in concentric arcs that organise the floor without drawing a centre.
The roof refuses the brick's weight. A shallow space frame in slim white tubing carries a translucent fabric that diffuses London's grey overhead light into something closer to the inside of a paper lantern. It touches the walls only through a row of square brick columns lifted clear of the enclosure, each one a stack of the same perforated units rotated ninety degrees. LANZA describes them as a grove. They behave more like punctuation, marking the long interior into bays without dividing it.
Walnut-stained timber furniture, curved benches that follow the wall, square stools and high-backed chairs sit on the brick floor as if part of the same garden vocabulary. There is no stage and no centre. The pavilion accepts a lectern, a reading, a crowd at an opening, then empties out into a place to sit alone with the trees showing over the rim of the wall. The threshold between inside and outside is held by light, not by glazing.
What LANZA has built is unfashionably literal. A serpentine, in a place called Serpentine, made of bricks that match the bricks already there. The pavilion does not invent a vocabulary so much as translate one. The English garden wall, a piece of vernacular engineering most often found around kitchen gardens in Suffolk, ends up at Kensington Gardens at full pavilion scale, holding a room together with nothing but its own waver.
