DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 22, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

The Curve Is the Structure

Every summer for twenty-five years, a different architect has built a temporary pavilion on the lawn of London's Serpentine South gallery, and each one works as the closest thing architecture has to a concept car: a single idea, built at full scale, with no functional brief and no client to please. The 2026 pavilion, which opened on 6 June, is the twenty-fifth in a line that began with Zaha Hadid in 2000. It is also, quietly, the most instructive design lesson on that lawn in years — because it refuses the one separation the rest of the industry treats as sacred.

Titled "a serpentine," the pavilion is by LANZA atelier, the Mexico City practice of Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo — only the second Mexican studio to receive the commission, after Frida Escobedo in 2018. Where a marquee pavilion usually strains for a never-before-seen form, this one reaches back to a humble piece of vernacular engineering: the crinkle-crankle wall, a serpentine of alternating curves found in the walled gardens of Suffolk and, before that, in ancient techniques adapted by Dutch engineers.

Here is the detail that should stop any designer cold: a crinkle-crankle wall uses fewer bricks than a straight one. A straight free-standing brick wall must be two bricks thick, or braced with buttresses, or it topples. A wavy wall can stand a single brick thick — because the curve is the buttress. The undulation that reads as decoration is, in fact, the entire structural system. The waviness is the strength.

That runs directly against how most things get made. We are trained to separate form from structure — style the shape first, then engineer something to hold it up, and negotiate the compromises downstream. The crinkle-crankle wall collapses that sequence into one move. The shape, the structure and the material budget are not three problems solved in order; they are a single decision that answers all three at once. You cannot value-engineer the wave out of the wall, because the wave is why the wall stands.

This is concept-phase thinking in its purest form: the highest-leverage decision is the one that resolves several constraints simultaneously, taken at the moment when form and function are still the same object. LANZA's two brick walls — one defining the pavilion's edge, the other bending in response to the tree canopy — carry a translucent roof on columns that shift gradually from solid to porous, "like a grove of trees." The brick was chosen to answer the historic façade of the gallery behind it. LANZA even carried the logic down to the furniture — chairs and stools cut from a single sapele hardwood — so the object scale repeats the building's discipline rather than contradicting it. Nothing is applied; every visible move is also doing structural or contextual work.

It also quietly reframes the word everyone now bolts on at the end: sustainability. The pavilion uses less material not because a spreadsheet demanded a late carbon cut, but because the form was chosen for its efficiency from the first sketch. The saving is a consequence of a good early decision, not a penance added afterwards — the difference between designing something efficient and decorating something wasteful with efficiency.

The Serpentine commission is the right stage for this precisely because it strips design back to the concept phase and nothing else. No program, no tenant, no resale value: past pavilions by Francis Kéré, Junya Ishigami, Lina Ghotmeh and Marina Tabassum have each been, essentially, one conviction built at 1:1. Selected each year by artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist, the series is a quarter-century archive of what architects do when the only brief is to have an idea.

LANZA's answer is the most disciplined kind: not a new shape, but an old one whose logic was always sound. And the lesson travels far beyond brick. In any medium, the decisions worth protecting are the ones where the aesthetic and the engineering are the same choice — where you literally cannot delete the beautiful part without breaking the thing. Most design spends its life trying to reconcile form and function after the fact. Once every twenty-five years or so, someone builds a wall that never let them separate in the first place.

Sources: