Lina Ghotmeh's Serpentine Pavilion 2023 Is A Delicate Timber Design In The Spirit Of A Folly In The Park That Celebrates The Ritual Of Sharing Food Around A Table.

Serpentine Pavilion 2023 designed by Lina Ghotmeh

“It’s such a privilege to be part of this project. The pavilion brings architecture closer to everyone; it proves that architecture is a necessity and that beauty, rather than being additional, is something that should be essential in our cities and in our lives,” says Lina Ghotmeh, the architect of the twenty-second Serpentine Pavilion.

The much-anticipated annual commission sees a temporary structure built on Kensington Gardens by the Serpentine South gallery in Hyde Park, London. The building will remain here for the summer, with the space free and open to the public for a casual coffee, a spot of lunch, a moment of respite, evening events, talks, music and more. At the end of its park life (if sold to a private buyer — this one has), the structure is moved to its new home, where it begins its second life. Or, as Ghotmeh says, “Hopefully, it takes the memory of here to its next place.”

Architect Lina Ghotmeh standing by 'À Table' Serpentine Pavilion 2023

Despite being widely recognized with projects that include Stone Garden Housing in Beirut and the Hermès workshop in Normandy, the Serpentine Pavilion is the Paris-based Ghotmeh’s first construction in the UK.

Titled “À Table,” her delicate circular timber pavilion is made in the spirit of an architectural folly. The structure is designed to be lightweight, feel organic, and follow the rhythms of nature, with the roof echoing branches of surrounding trees, and screen walls, with their laser-cut leaf motifs, opening up to park life. She muses, “We can learn a lot from nature’s ingenuity.”

Ghotmeh wanted the building to be an expression of the moment, reflecting on our time and its challenges. For this, she returned to her past. “Growing up in Beirut during the war, I remember the importance of places of assembly, of architecture as a way to bring people together, and as a way to bring us closer to nature and beauty,” she says.

The structure is designed to be lightweight, feel organic, and follow the rhythm of nature, with ... [+] screen walls opening up to park life

The ritual of sharing food around a table would naturally lead to discussions, often heated ones, on politics, personal lives, and dreams — something I can personally relate to growing up similarly in an Iran of war and destruction, where family meals signified safety and warmth, and a moment of peace. “The idea came from memories of my childhood of being together gathered around food, and food being the moment we felt rooted in our earth.”

“À Table” thus invites us to take a moment, sit together at a table, and engage and participate in dialogue while sharing food. To facilitate this and create a place for assembly, Ghotmeh has designed a concentric communal table and matching wooden seats, executed by the design firm Conran, that circles the pavilion interior. She has also crafted an organic menu for the pavilion café as a way to further consider the impact of what we eat on the environment. She says, “If we eat differently, we can form different relations to Earth.”

Ghotmeh speaks of digging for historical references to see how this space resonates with history and memories, with the design honoring the Serpentine’s origin as a teahouse. “It’s about this moment of being under a roof, giving us a serenity, some slow time in our fast times. And I hope to see children running around here like a carousal,” she says, smiling at the fantasy merry-go-round structure she’s designed.

The circular table is purposely designed to bring people together and entice conversatiob

“Lina told us, growing up in Beirut, architecture was coming out of the ruins; that architecture allowed us to dream of ways of bringing people together and bringing beauty,” says Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist. “À Table is a call to sit together, engage and participate in dialogue and share food, forming intimacy. Lina says this deep exchange sustains life and produces new life, ideas, and formations.” And her structure connects very naturally to the surrounding nature and forms conversations with the Serpentine South’s summer exhibition by Tomás Saraceno, which is a powerful commentary on ecology and our fragile earth.

Since its inaugural building by the late Zaha Hadid in 2000, the Serpentine pavilion commission has become a much-anticipated event and remains a critical platform for introducing international architects whose work may otherwise not be visible in this county. Obrist quotes the Lebanese poet, essayist and painter Etel Adnan as setting the motto for the pavilion project: “She told us that we need togetherness not separation, love not suspicion, a common future not isolation.” Meanwhile, Serpentine’s CEO Bettina Korek says, “The genesis of the pavilion was in how you can show architecture without it being drawings and models; how can we build and create these platforms for architects. The pavilion fulfills our mission to create connections between artists and society.”

Lina Ghotmeh and her 2023 Serpentine Pavilion

Admittedly, I am deeply fascinated by the idea of public art and congregation and rituals of public gatherings, so my view may be biased. But despite concerns over the construction work and its ecological impact (there are tons more problematic building developments going up around our city as we speak), the pavilion’s positives, to my mind, outweigh the negatives. It offers new ways to see architecture and engage with it spatially, and its location in a public space naturally opens architecture and design to wider communities.

Ghotmeh’s pavilion is a very different building from last year’s deeply meditative blackened structure by the artist and architect Theaster Gates. Yet visiting this airy space with my sister at the end of a working day, sitting around the table, the light from the wall cutouts forming charming leaflike shadows around us, we stayed completely absorbed in deep conversation until sundown.

Serpentine Pavilion 2023 “À table” by Lina Ghotmeh is open until October 2023.

Read about Serpentine Gallery’s “Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Web[s] of Life,” Cao Fei at Sprüth Magers, Isaac Julian at Tate Britain, Steve McQueen’s “Grenfell” at Serpentine Galleries, “Rites of Passage” at Gagosian London, and Leonardo Drew at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.