Lina Ghotmeh's Serpentine Pavilion Opens to the Public
The pavilion, titled À table, reflects the Serpentine's history as a tea house.
Lina Ghotmeh and the Serpentine Pavilion 2023. Photo: Harry Richards for Serpentine 2023.
French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh's Serpentine Pavilion opens at Serpentine South today.
Titled À table, the pavilion reflects Serpentine Gallery's history as a tea house, and calls upon architectural history from the U.K. and abroad. Wooden beams, carved screens and a carousel-like roof envelop a table that follows the shape of the pavilion footprint. It brings to mind a debating chamber, a place of worship, or a merry-go-round.
'It's a place that brings architecture closer to everyone, and proves that architecture is a necessity for our daily life, and that beauty is not something additional, but is really a necessity,' Ghotmeh remarked at a press preview.
Intended to resonate with different histories, memories, and follies, Ghotmeh noted that she looked at Stonehenge and toguna structures built by the Dogon people in Mali 'where elderly meet [and] have to stay seated until they reach their decisions.'
The title À table comes from the French call-to-meal, to sit together in dialogue. If the press preview is anything to go by, Ghotmeh has fully realised this idea. Journalists, photographers, and artists alike sat around the table on both sides, drinking coffee and chatting as they waited for Ghotmeh and Serpentine's Artistic Director Hans-Ulrich Obrist to address the crowd.
Obrist drew the connection between Ghotmeh's pavilion, Tomas Saraceno's Web(s) of Life exhibition (1 June–10 September 2023), and the ecological outlook of the Serpentine's summer programme.
While Ghotmeh's choice of wood as a building material is intended to be sustainable, many question how environmentally-friendly a structure conceived to remain in situ for just a few months can really be.
But as À table seems to be earmarked for a new location already, and devised using low impact materials in harmony with its surroundings, Ghotmeh's structure seemingly stands strong on this front.
Previous Serpentine Pavilions include Theaster Gates' Black Chapel in 2022, Sumayya Vally's Fragments in 2021, and a slate canopy by Junya Ishigami in 2019. —[O]
