Serpentine Pavilion 2026: pushing architectural boundaries. An interview with LANZA atelier

We started our practice doing exhibition design. These were ephemeral projects with a high degree of freedom for material and structural experimentation because we were putting up structures that were going to be taken down after some months, so the museums and cultural spaces felt comfortable letting us do things that had not been done before. Since then, we have pursued a certain degree of experimentation through our more permanent projects as well. We try to push the boundaries of our practice with every project. a serpentine is definitely inscribed in this line of thinking. 

In recent years, we have accomplished several projects using brick, like the Forest House (2019) in which an organic white brick wall adapts to the positions of pre-existing trees and sometimes operates as a corridor and sometimes as a lattice to delimit an area within nature; and the 1973-2021 installation at Concéntrico (2021) in which we worked with exposed red brick — a material representative of social interest architecture in Spain — stacked without using mass so that at the end of the festival more than 90% of the bricks were dismantled and effectively reused. We like how brick is made of earth —of clay — its thermal mass and how it is just the right size to fit in one hand, so it ultimately refers to the human body. 

As we were working on our proposal for the Serpentine Pavilion, we naturally came across an English architectural feature also called serpentine. This is the crinkle-crankle wall, a type of brick wall with alternating curves that originated in Ancient Egypt and was brought to the UK by Dutch engineers as far back as the 17th century. By virtue of its sinuous shape, the serpentine wall is recognised for requiring fewer bricks than a straight wall, as its winding geometry introduces lateral support to an otherwise flimsy one-brick-wide structure. In the hands of gardeners and built on an East-West axis, these elements become fruit-walls that soak up the heat from the southern exposure and release it at night, providing a warm agricultural environment. The structure employs less while providing more, which is a timely lesson for our current era of overconsumption. It’s quite magical that the same word gives name to a water feature, a lake, to a place, Serpentine, and to an architectural element, a wall. Especially considering the powerful place that the serpent holds in Mesoamerican cosmology. This is the first time that a Serpentine Pavilion actually revolves around the serpentine.