Frida Escobedo’s pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery
Frida EscobedoVisitable from 15 June to 7 October in Kensington Gardens, London, the Serpentine Gallery’s pavilion this year is designed by the firm of Frida Escobedo (Mexico City, 1979). Formed by two lattice-wrapped rectangular volumes, it fuses typical Mexican architectural elements with references to British tradition. A permeable wall built with stacked concrete tiles handmade in the United Kingdom shapes a courtyard where a triangular mirror of water and its reflection in curving mirror ceilings emphasize how light changes in the course of the day. The Mexican Frida Escobeda is so far the London gallery’s youngest-ever choice for the design of its highly successful summer pavilions since the first of them went up in 2000. Her predecessors are Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer, MVRDV, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Rem Koolhaas, Olafur Eliasson, Frank Gehry, SANAA (Sejima y Nishizawa), Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, Sou Fujimoto, Smiljan Radic, Selgascano, BIG, and Diébédo Francis Kéré.