Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Aligned with the Greenwich Meridian … how Escobedo’s enclosed courtyard will look.
Aligned with the Greenwich Meridian … how Escobedo’s enclosed courtyard will look. Photograph: © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura
Aligned with the Greenwich Meridian … how Escobedo’s enclosed courtyard will look. Photograph: © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura

Serpentine summer pavilion: a Mexican shadow clock built for the British breeze

This article is more than 6 years old

With its perforated walls, mirrored canopy and reflecting pool, Frida Escobedo’s enclosed courtyard – made of British roof tiles – will be a vast translucent timepiece powered by light and shadow

The phrase Mexican-British fusion might call to mind an ungodly mishmash of fish and chip burritos or steak and kidney tacos. But, in architectural terms, it looks like it could have intriguing results. We’ll find out this summer – in the form of the Serpentine pavilion, designed this year by young Mexican architect Frida Escobedo as a cross-cultural combination of Mexican domestic architecture with a distinctly British twist.

Opening in London on 15 June, the structure will take the form of an enclosed courtyard, formed of two rectangular volumes, with walls made of simple stacks of grey cement roof tiles. The stacked tiles will form perforated screens, or celosias, the traditional breeze walls common to Mexican houses, but here made of the everyday off-the-peg material used to roof practically every British house.

The outer walls will be aligned with the Serpentine Gallery, while the inner structure will be in line with the Greenwich Meridian. Entering through the translucent layered screens, visitors will find themselves beneath a curving mirror-polished canopy, looking on to a triangular reflecting pool cast into the concrete floor of the pavilion. With light filtering in through the stacked tile screens, it could be an atmospheric place of rippling shadows and reflections, constantly changing throughout the day.

Rocking circular stage … Escobedo’s creation for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Photograph: © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura

As a dark-walled courtyard with a pitched roof, it has strong echoes of Peter Zumthor’s 2011 pavilion design, although it promises to be a lighter, airier place than his tar-daubed cloister. “My design is a meeting of material and historical inspirations inseparable from the city of London itself,” says Escobedo, “and an idea which has been central to our practice from the beginning: the expression of time in architecture through inventive use of everyday materials and simple forms. For the pavilion, we have added the materials of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, turning the building into a timepiece that charts the passage of the day.”

Escobedo … ‘We’re trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible’ Photograph: © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura

Born in Mexico City in 1979, Escobedo is the youngest architect to have been selected for the Serpentine’s annual commission, which began in 2000 with Zaha Hadid. In recent years, the gallery has moved away from selecting “starchitects” to highlighting lesser known designers from around the world. Escobedo may be far from a household name in the UK, but her pavilions and installations will be familiar to anyone on the circuit of architecture biennales and triennales, where Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist is often to be found, conducting his masochistic interview marathons.

Her work featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 and 2014, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2013, for which she built a rocking circular stage in a town square, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015, the same year she built another stage structure in the courtyard of the V&A, this time as a network of fragmented platforms.

Her built projects in Mexico include the renovation of the Octavio Paz library in Guadalajara and the transformation of La Tallera Siqueiros gallery in Cuernavaca in 2014, where she wrapped an existing studio and workshop complex with a continuous celosia wall of perforated concrete blocks. She has recently been working on a pair of social housing projects, one in the rural area of Taxco in Guerrero state, designed to be built incrementally, and another another in the city of Saltillo.

“We’re trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible, while also reducing the debt of the people who are acquiring these properties,” Escobedo said in an interview. The Taxco project focuses on constructing the largest part of the house with the least possible number of walls, reducing the cost and making sure the home doesn’t become the cause of debt that lasts for generations. The designs feature double-height rooms that can be subdivided vertically as the family grows, and a method of construction that allows costs to be shared between neighbours – innovative thinking that the UK’s own housing providers could learn from.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Counterspace architects to be youngest Serpentine pavilion designers

  • Serpentine Pavilion; Antepavilion; Colour Palace – review

  • Row over use of unpaid interns by Serpentine pavilion architect

  • 'Alien mothership': Christo's mastaba floats on London's Serpentine

  • Serpentine Pavilion 2019: Japan's great conjuror falls foul of health and safety

  • Serpentine Pavilion 2018 review – cement tiles, shade and a paddling pool

  • Serpentine pavilion 2017: a shimmering African canopy spreads out over Kensington Gardens

  • Serpentine pavilion and summer houses review – Dane’s design stacks up well

  • Serpentine pavilion 2016: Bjarke Ingels' pyramid for the Minecraft generation

  • Serpentine pavilion 2015: a rainbow wormhole ready to suck you into another dimension

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed