Marina Tabassum Architects, Serpentine Pavilion 2025, London (United Kingdom)

In May of 2022, Basel held its first Architecture Week, a full calendar of activities that gave access into many of the city’s prestigious practices and outstanding buildings. A year and two months later, the municipality of Providencia, Chile, made the clean-up of a water feature coincide with a public act held to revitalize its main urban park. A Norman forest has since the end of June 2024 hosted the Forêt Monumentale initiative with the intention of promoting a more sustainable program of tourism in the region. And in the spring of this year, Spain was the country guest of honor at the Bogotá International Book Fair, one of the most important in all of Spanish America.

This last month of May, the Belén neighborhood in Iquitos, Peru, known as the Venice of the Amazon because of its buildings raised on stilts, inaugurated the second Muyuna Floating Film Festival. Just two weeks after that, Braga held Forma da Vizinhança, a series of projects carried out under the umbrella of the city’s turn as Portuguese Capital of Culture, with the objective of activating depressed points in the outskirts. Then in June, Concéntrico turned Logroño – for the eleventh time – into a laboratory for reflecting on the theme of public space. And a few days later marked the opening of the Aranya Theatre Festival, an event which seeks to give a cultural varnish to the Bohai seaside resort, the new mecca of Chinese architecture.

Though scattered in time and space, the eight recent events featured in this dossier have something in common: they were born with a closing date, so the venue structures had to be designed for quick assembly and easy dismantling. They fall under a typology, ephemeral architecture, that is almost as immemorial as domestic architecture, for nothing is more human than coming together for a celebration. From pharaonic banquets to Baroque pageantry, from Universal Exhibitions to summer festivals, all these collective happenings endeavor to make themselves visible through constructions that offer recognizable images and memorable experiences. Because they are short-lived, these projects are also opportunities to test spaces and materials with a freedom that would be impossible in more ‘serious’ works, as well as to explore new modes of social interaction and new ways of intervening on city and nature.

Arquitectura Viva already tackled this matter in issue 141, in the tenth year of what is perhaps the profession’s most coveted commission for a temporary building: the summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in London. In theory, as with the works we covered then, nothing will be left of the eight presented here but a handful of images and a single memory to cling to in this world of changes where everything tosses and turns at night and is at risk of ending up consumed by fire.[+]

Miguel Arraiz, The Temple at Burning Man Festival 2025, Black Rock, Nevada (USA)