Marina Tabassum’s functional installation for the Serpentine Pavilion 2025, titled ‘A Capsule in Time’ stands at the juncture of art, history and sustainability. For a Bangladeshi architect and photographer visiting the Pavilion, the feeling is particularly nostalgic
Summer in London feels like taking a gamble with your sense of self. You could wake up to brilliant sunshine and then realize it’s drizzling suddenly. You could walk out of your room prepared for the drizzle only to find white clouds floating against a brilliant blue sky above you. Somehow or the other one gets used to this fiasco, but then there are days when plans must be altered or cancelled, or you need to reroute your travel through the tube network. However, on this particular summer day in June, I knew I would make my way to Hyde Park to experience a space I’ve been excited to see since it was announced to the public early on in January.
Amongst all the green expanses, Hyde Park has been my favourite park to get lost in thought within the bustle of London. It’s full of stretches of meadows and forest-like clusters of massive trees and defined niches hosting a piece of art, whether historical or contemporary. Summer in Hyde Park is what emphasizes the latter to the most with the erection of the Serpentine Pavilion. This would be my 03rd Serpentine Pavilion experience, and what makes this year’s Pavilion particularly special is that it felt like a piece of finding something from home in a foreign land. Titled “A Capsule in Time”, the 2025 Pavilion is designed by Marina Tabassum and her firm, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Marina Tabassum is a Bangladeshi architect and educator whose work has long been about grounding contemporary, functional forms within the realities of climate, culture, and memory. Having had the privilege to have her as a mentor during my undergrad to having experienced her architectural endeavours in person, to be able to see her work presented here as the 25th Serpentine Pavilion was to encounter something at once astonishingly new and oddly familiar.
Walking towards the Pavilion from the corner of Serpentine South, the canopy-like structure slowly emerges from in between the surrounding hedges and towering trees. It appears as a rhythm of wooden bands split apart at certain cuts, with the entirety looking like a spindle bedpost similar to the ones you find in the antique markets of Dhaka. The slim wooden bands are linked through angled panels in a zigzag manner filtering the shifting daylight into the space below. Edging towards the pavilion, I was not only struck by the single tree at the centre of the Pavilion, softening the architectural details coming into my attention but also the presence of the space embodied within, a place shaped by light and shadow from the surrounding environment, and by the pause and passage of the people interacting with it.
Stepping inside the pavilion, the experience untangles gradually. The “capsule” takes physical shape, with one end hosting a small café while at the other end you can see people sit on the benches aligned to the inside edge. Sitting at one of these benches, I started observing the way people approached the Pavilion and tried to capture them through my camera. The central courtyard holding the Gingko tree felt like an interesting simplification of the Bangladeshi uthan, as families assembled with parents being dragged on by kids who were enthralled by playing with the small stones and running in and out of the Pavilion. In the end with the café, which is a signature Serpentine entity every year, you could spot people engaged in conversations while the surrounding foreground encompassed the shelves carrying books handpicked by the architect herself. Tabassum had designed and envisioned the Pavilion after its dismantling from the Serpentine lawn, to become a library accessible to all, something which is deeply reflective of her design philosophy. Whether through the construction of Khudi Bari, a cyclone-resilient housing in coastal Bangladesh, or the luminous Bait-Ur-Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, Marina Tabassum has always sought to create architecture that is responsive to the people and place it inhabits. Through “A Capsule in Time”, she extended that same philosophy which is of making space that is vast yet intimate, temporary yet enduring, rooted in memory yet open to the world.
Spending the entire day in the Pavillion allowed me to witness the light shifting through the panels gradually changing the ambiance of the place. Staring at the coloured panels which created a warm to cool gradient arching upwards felt reminiscent of a multitude of things. Stained glass in fixed modules, perhaps a subtle nod to the French doors of the neighbouring Serpentine South gallery. Marina Tabassum has attributed taking inspiration from “shamianas” and how they act as core points of huge gatherings of different social functions, with its simple stretches of fabrics pulled and held together by bamboo poles. It is slightly questionable as to how many people outside of the sub-continent would be able to grasp this huge translation of design, but as a Bangladeshi who has attended scores of weddings in the 90s which always had an event in an open field of Dhaka covered in long rolls of carpet, while overhead and around the “shamianas” allowed the space to be changed fit for a colourful deshi festival. The Pavilion was completely reminiscent of this, as different groups of people passed through or sat on the benches.
At the end of the day though, the Serpentine Pavilion is a fleeting presence. Even in its ephemerality, it carries an afterlife, just as the shadows and moments it held this summer will linger within those who entered it.