The ground on which the Serpentine Pavilion 2025 now stands shifts with every passing hour of the day. Soft daylight filtering through the translucent facade of the structure—commissioned to architect and educator Marina Tabassum, marking her first built structure in the UK—creates a rhythmic, dynamic interior space for the pavilion architecture. With a skeleton composed entirely in wood, four capsules bracket a semi-mature Ginkgo tree, meant to symbolically emphasise the notion of the slow passage of time and resilience, climatic and otherwise. The tree’s leaves will transform from a lively green to a rich golden yellow in the duration the pavilion is open to the public. A Capsule in Time—the name given by Tabassum to her ephemeral pavilion, on view from June 6 – October 26, 2025, in Kensington Gardens—in many ways reflects the forbearing touch and ethos with which the Bangladeshi architect considers architectures, natural landscapes and local communities. “The Serpentine Pavilion has a certain life in this park, [where] every year, it's a new commission. [While the pavilions are given] a second life, they're [also] gone, replaced by some other pavilion,” she notes in conversation with STIR.

Drawing a parallel between the temporary nature of pavilions and the seemingly impermanent nature of built structures in the fluvial Bengal delta, Tabassum continues, “As we know, houses or homes are always something static. But in our landscape, [they’re about] constant movement for many people. That idea of temporality or, let's say, impermanence, is quite embedded in our landscape—and when you come here and design a pavilion, it has that [same] temporality in a sense.” The lens of temporality, particular to the Bengal delta’s ever-changing terrain, and its translation into an architecture that is based on being mindful of available resources and a reciprocal relationship to its ground has, in many ways, come to define Tabassum’s multivalent practice.

Having established a studio in Dhaka with the equally renowned Kashef Choudhary in 1995 and then moving on to establish her eponymously named studio in 2005, Tabassum’s design ethics centre the notion of rootedness, encompassing concerns of climate, context and culture. The studio first came to prominence for their restrained and considerate brick structures, designed with low budgets, an emphasis on materiality and an ineffable quality of light and lightness. The practice has since evolved into balancing design and research, along with the development of architectural systems that combat the effects of the climate crisis, felt most acutely in the delta region. “We try to address [the mobility of the landscape] through architecture in many ways for people who are marginalised,” she notes in conversation with STIR's Samta Nadeem at the Serpentine Gallery South. She continues, addressing the myriad responsibilities and responses around context that her studio has been trying to address; “It's a very different way of living and understanding, which we—coming from cities—would never understand. For us, the last five years have been a constant learning process.”

From Tabassum's words, and her work doubling up as perceivable acts of care in architecture, it becomes clearer that her 'style' is not so much a language for design as it is a way of being, with an attention paid to the flows of both landscape and time; as built space reshaping itself to adapt to the fluviality of Bangladesh. Khudi Bari, for instance, designed as a contextual response to the frequent flooding in the region, is an ephemeral system of dwelling that her studio developed to address the volatility experienced by people who live in ‘delta temporalities’. The project's key brief is to be able to afford local communities in the region a sense of agency to combat natural disasters while catering to their particular lifestyles, in tune with natural landscapes. For the Serpentine Pavilion this year, this contextuality and its translation into material is foregrounded by the pavilion’s wooden architecture, emphasising a definitive lightness of touch on the ground and its footprint. This light touch extends to the material used for the facade and the construction of the structure itself, meant to be dismountable.

To rethink the human condition as a temporal state of being is also to reflect on the idea of transience - the idea that architecture—considered a symbol of permanence—is not so. Mutability in our symbols of existence, including our homes, built environments, legacies and even memory, suggests an acceptance of eradication and ruin, an acceptance that what we have is limited. The notion of scarcity, of making do with what is available and its translation into the ephemeral strategies for design in the Global South was assiduously outlined by Tosin Oshinowo in her curatorial programme for the 2023 iteration of the Sharjah Architecture Triennale. Responding to the ideas Oshinowo set forth—the scarcity of resources, the positioning of traditional knowledge systems from the Global South as an ‘alternative’ to the extractivist, cornucopian mindset of former colonial powers, and resilience through vernacular architecture—Tabassum draws a connection between the Dutch canals and the conditions of her homeland.

Countering the European, and more specifically colonial instinct to control and tame nature, she notes a shift in the attitude about the seeming permanence of architecture in her conversation with STIR. To counter the systems that have led to the world we currently inhabit (often marked by induced disasters) requires the imagination fostered by a new temporality and situated ways of being. Tabassum’s work, understood as a means to create a dialogue between people and place, tactility and immateriality, between volume and space exemplified by her commissioned pavilion, is a manifesto to this subdued architectural ethos.

At the same time, Tabassum has envisioned this pavilion—the 25th commission for the initiative, first endowed to Zaha Hadid—as a celebration, a coming together of people from all over the world in London to experience the British summer tradition of ‘park-going’. To this, in her official statement, she describes the structure as a ‘shamiyana at a Bengali wedding’. Invoking the image of ephemeral architectures—constructed in bamboo and textile—meant for gatherings in South Asia, the pavilion also brings to mind an abstracted representation of a puja pandal, popular in West Bengal's annual festival celebrations. Meant to be a space not only for gathering, but a celebration of community, Tabassum’s hope for the space to foster conversation and the sharing of knowledge is perhaps keenly akin to the air of camaraderie shared in pandals during Durga Pujo, only for these structures to be dismantled within the week. The kinetic elements for the pavilion, allowing its space to expand and contract as needed, further underscore this dynamism. Once open, the pavilion, also active for a set duration of time only to be dismantled and housed elsewhere after six months, will spotlight the richness of Bengali culture, literature, poetry, and ecological thinking through a curated list of books chosen by Tabassum along with her team at MTA.

In her official statement for the pavilion, Tabassum has noted that architecture is a way to live beyond your legacy, to create a fiction of timelessness and permanence through inert materiality. Yet, of her own legacy, the best she hopes for is to offer her knowledge and experience as a tool towards ensuring a better environment for the people around her. At the beginning of the London summer, with people eager to step outdoors and relax in the sun with friends and family, the pavilion orchestrates a perceptible shift. With the Ginkgo tree acting as a pivot for the activities within, 8000kms from the Ganges delta, London has become the site for a fresh understanding of impermanence, a capsule in time.