Lina Gothmeh’s Serpentine Pavilion gets everyone around the table

Lina Gothmeh’s Serpentine Pavilion gets everyone around the table

Serpentine has announced that the next summer pavilion will be designed by Lebanese-born architect Lina Ghotmeh. The 22nd pavilion of the Serpentine Galleries will be opened in June 2023. Goldman Sachs supporting the annual project for the 9th consecutive year.
This prestigious commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid, has presented the first completed UK structures by some of the biggest names and emerging talents in international architecture. The Pavilion has evolved over the years as a participatory public and artistic platform for the Serpentine’s experimental, interdisciplinary community and family programs.
Ghotmeh leads her practice Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture in Paris, France, where she develops projects at the crossroads of architecture, art, and design, on a global scale.
Her practice takes an in-depth 360° approach to its projects including thorough research on location history, typology of the place, materials, resources, and users’ habits.

cover: Lina Ghotmeh © Gilbert Hage

The 22nd Pavilion will continue this ongoing practice of ‘Archaeology of the future ‘, by exploring notions of memory, space, and landscape through the architect’s own personal methodology.
Next year’s Pavilion will be titled À table, the French call to sit down together at a table and will allude to a sense of unity with the form of its structure and an organic design of a table as well as seating formation inviting human interactions.

Lina Ghotmeh, Architect said: “À table is an invitation to dwell together, in the same space and around the same table. It is an encouragement to enter into a dialogue, to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and the Earth. The Earth that embraces us is our first source of sustenance; without it, we living beings, could not survive. Rethinking what and how much we eat – how we ‘consume’ and how we weave our relationships to one another and the living world – moves us towards a more sustainable, ecosystemic communion with the Earth. Our ‘cuisine’ grounds us home; it reminds us how linked we are to the climates in which we grew up. As a Mediterranean woman, born and raised in Beirut, and living in Paris, I feel a deep belonging to our ground, to what it contains, and to what it embraces: from the buried yet weathering archaeology of past civilizations to the embedded living world that spurs green life to sprout from every crack in the streets. In my practice as an architect, I excavate to design (and learn) from the traces of the past and I listen to the voices of my ancestors as well as those of our living world. These voices vividly resonate with future structures as ways to influence and challenge tomorrow’s architecture. In today’s changing times, this Pavilion offers a celebratory space. It is endowed with a table, around which we will sit together in a modest, low structure and in an atmosphere reminiscent of the Toguna huts of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, designed to bring all members of a community together in discussion. Here we can eat, work, play, meet, talk, rethink, and decide. Built with bio-sourced and low-carbon materials, the structure appears like a skeleton. Sustainably sourced timber ribs are arranged to support a suspended pleated roof. Echoing the structures of tree leaves, the Pavilion embraces the nature of the park in which it emerges. Reminding us of the many lives blossoming beneath our feet, the concave lines of its perimeter are drawn from the forms in the stems and canopies of adjacent trees. While rooted in its place and welcoming the space of the park with its open gallery-like envelope, the Pavilion grows as an adaptable system. It can be disassembled and reassembled, allowing it to live beyond its Serpentine site while holding the memory of its original ground.”

Serpentine Pavilion 2023 designed by Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture Design render, exterior view. © 2022 Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture, courtesy: Serpentine

Serpentine Pavilion 2023 designed by Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture Design render, interior view. © 2022 Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture, courtesy: Serpentine

Lina Ghotmeh
Lina Ghotmeh’s (b.1980, Beirut, LB, Lebanon) projects include the Estonian National Museum (Grand Prix Afex 2016 & Mies Van Der Rohe Nominee); ‘Stone Garden’, crafted tower and gallery spaces in Beirut (Dezeen 2021 Architecture of the Year Award), Lebanon; ‘Réalimenter Masséna’ wooden tower dedicated to sustainable food culture in Paris (laureate of Paris’ call for innovative projects), France; Ateliers Hermès in Normandy, first passive low carbon workshops building, in France; Wonderlab exhibition in Tokyo and Beijing & Les Grands Verres for the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. 4/5 Ghotmeh is actively involved in the academic world and has lectured in institutions across the world. She is Louis I Khan 2021 visiting professor at Yale School of Architecture in the United States and Gehry Chair 2021–22 at the University of Toronto, Canada. She co-presides the Scientific Network for Architecture in extreme climates and she was a member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022 Jury. Among Prizes, she was awarded the 2020 Schelling Architecture Prize, has received the 2020 Tamayouz ‘Woman of Outstanding Achievement’, the French Fine Arts Academy Cardin Award 2019, the Architecture Academy Dejean Prize 2016, and the French Ministry of Culture Award in 2008.
Her work is currently exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum in New York and was previously shown at the MAXXI in Rome (2021–22) and the 17th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2021). Her projects have been published by Phaidon, RIBA, Domus, and Architectural Record.

Serpentine Pavilion
This pioneering commission, which began in 2000 with Dame Zaha Hadid, has presented the first UK structures by some of the biggest names in international architecture. The Pavilion is realized with the support of technical advisor Aecom.
In recent years it has grown into a highly anticipated showcase for emerging talents, from Sumayya Vally, Counterspace (South Africa), the youngest architect to be commissioned, and Frida Escobedo (Mexico), to Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso) and Bjarke Ingels (Denmark), whose 2016 Pavilion was the most visited architectural and design exhibition in the world. This year’s Pavilion, Black Chapel was designed by Theaster Gates (US).