This Year’s Serpentine Pavilion Is an Elegant Call to Action
Above: Architect Lina Ghotmeh in her Paris studio.
A garden in the middle of London’s Hyde Park is an unlikely location for design’s next big thing. But ever since Zaha Hadid inaugurated the first pavilion for the Serpentine Galleries in 2000, the commission has become one of the most prestigious on the global architecture scene. The latest architect to be appointed is Paris-based Lina Ghotmeh, known for her deep dives into the history and cultural resonance of a place. This spring, she debuted a new leather workshop in Louviers, France, for Hermès with an arched design made of 550,000 bricks crafted by a local mason.
At the Serpentine, Ghotmeh’s pavilion, on view from June 9 through October 29, is a delicate wooden structure with a pleated roof and colonnade surrounding a transparent interior. She calls the 22nd Serpentine Pavilion À table—inspired in part by her childhood in Lebanon, where food is essential to culture and connected to geography. “Food is about bringing us together,” she says. “And it has more relevance than ever because eating sustainably betters our relationship to the planet.”
Ghotmeh’s “archaeological” approach began with research into topics as varied as ancient Greek symposia, Stonehenge, and Dogon toguna huts. Tables and stools she designed for the pavilion will be on sale at the Conran Shop, and the pavilion itself is sustainable: It can be taken apart and reassembled. In London, it will host climate conversations and artist talks. And, she promises, “There will be a great opening dinner.”
We caught up with Ghotmeh to chat about the Serpentine commission and other recent projects.
ED: Your design for the 22nd Serpentine Pavilion merges architecture with food, convening, and community. Why did you go in this direction?
Lina Ghotmeh: I grew up in Lebanon where food very much relates to geography. It brings us together and is linked to the environment and the climate, since the food we eat is embedded and embodied in the ground. If we change the way we eat, we also change the way we relate to the planet.
ED: What inspired the name, À table?
LG: I now live in France, and “À table!” is what parents will say to their children when it’s time to gather around the table. Even at work, colleagues gather around a table to discuss and decide on important matters. The pavilion is an attempt to bring together people in one community, one reality, one home.
ED: How do you plan to bring the space to life?
LG: From the outside, it’s almost like a carousel with a floating roof and a gallery around it that allows one to walk around to see the park but to be protected from the outside weather. But the inside is kind of a surprise: It’s like a cocoon, the beating heart of the pavilion. We’re planning to hold conferences inside to talk about food and sustainability, and events around food and art.
ED: How did you make the pavilion itself sustainable?
LG: I wanted it to be modular and reusable, and it is built of wood, a great material for that purpose. It has radiating beams that repeat, almost like a leaf structure. Wood is one of the most sustainable materials with the least impact in terms of carbon footprint. I also designed tables and chairs for the space that can be moved and reassembled. You can sit around the table or gather on the floor.
ED: You recently designed a new building for Hermès’s leather workshop in Louviers, France. What interested you in that project?
LG: It opened in April and is a low-carbon passive building, so it’s very ambitious in terms of its environmental impact. I worked with a local brickmaker there to make 550,000 bricks for the project, and bring back the art of masonry, which was somewhat forgotten in that region where the earth is great for brickmaking. The building is designed as a series of arches. This is a place where Hermès makes saddles, so I was thinking of horses and the rhythm of their gallop.
ED: The Serpentine commission is one of the most prestigious in the architecture world. What does it mean to you?
LG: It’s exciting. It lets you extract yourself from all the projects you are doing and focus on something that is temporal. At the same time, there’s a lot of responsibility too, because the pavilion somehow expresses the time we are in.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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