Serpentine Pavilion 2021 by Counterspace

The 2021 Serpentine Pavilion by Sumayya Vally of Johannesburg-based studio Counterspace splices together forms taken from meeting spaces – from bookshops to markets and places of worship – significant to migrant communities in London.

Vally drew on meeting spots pivotal in communities in Tower Hamlets, Edgware Road, Notting Hill, Brixton, Hoxton, Hackney and Peckham – which she describes as “spaces across which we can gather to share and to differ” – to inform the design of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion.

“The design of the Serpentine Pavilion 2021 is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging in London,” says Vally, who founded Counterspace in 2015. “The shapes and forms in the Pavilion are the result of abstracting, adding, superimprosing and splicing architectural elements, varying in scales of intimacy, from various locations.”

“This drawing on erased and existing communal spaces recognises architecture’s role in preserving and evolving the culture of a place and the connections people have to it,” she says. “By engaging with stories of migration – the dis-placement and re-placement of people – the design symbolically folds London onto the Serpentine lawn to bring together a multitude of histories, referencing diasporas and geographies within and beyond the city.”

The curving canopy of the pavilion shelters a landscape made up of fragments of these spaces – seating, columns, niches, ramps, imprints and podiums – in cork and mico-cement.

For the first time, “fragments” of the pavilion have been located outside Hyde Park’s Kensington Gardens with the ambition to become gathering spots within communities. These will be located at New Beacon Books in Finsbury Park – one of the first black publisher and bookersellers in the UK, The Tabernacle – a venue and community hub in Notting Hill, The Albany arts centre in Deptford and the Becontree Forever Arts and Culture Hub at Valence Library in Barking and Dagenham – opened this year to mark the centenary of the UK’s biggest council housing estate.

In conjunction with Vally’s commission – the 20th edition of the Pavilion – the Serpentine has also announced its first fellowship programme, called Support Structures for Support Structures. It will offer grants of £10,000 and mentorships to up to 10 invited artists and collectives committed to doing work in communities.

“We have witnessed how artists working collaboratively with people can have an impact on our city, from making injustices more visible, as well as demonstrating how art can play a role in movement spaces and community organising,” says Amal Khalaf, the Serpentine’s civic curator. ” Often this work is not so visible, and the labour and care that comes with the commitment to this way of working is not always accounted for or made possible by existing structures in the art world.”

The commission marks a shift in direction for the Serpentine Pavilion says architect and Serpentine trustee David Adjaye: “Counterspace, who were chosen for the 2020 Pavilion, which is now obviously opening in 2021, were chosen after a rigorous discussion about the direction of the Pavilion and the opportunities it was offering to emerging generations. And it was felt looking at the wide scope of proposals that came in, that it seemed like this was a window for somebody from a much younger generation, the emerging generation, to have a voice.”

He describes the work by Vally – who is the youngest architect to be commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion – as “compelling”, a “monument to different communities and times”.

“Counterspace demonstrates a unique approach to architecture. One that starts with and foregrounds people, their needs, and also always the local context,” adds Serpentine artistic direct Hans Ulrich Obrist. “The practice really extends the boundaries of what architecture is.”

Past iterations of the Serpentine Pavilion have been designed by architects Frida Escobedo, Francis Kéré and Junya Ishigama.

This year’s pavilion will be open to the public from 11 June – 17 October 2021.