Geometry Instead of Mass: How a Suffolk Fruit-Garden Wall Became the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion
Updated: Oct 6
Walk beside the south wall of this year's pavilion in Kensington Gardens and, as Alessandro Arienzo told Frieze, "you never notice when it's going to end because you never see the finish of the line." It bends away from you, then back, built up from columns one brick across. A straight brick wall, as Abascal points out, needs at least two lines of bricks to stay up. Curve it, and the shape does the work.
That's the whole idea of 'a serpentine', the 25th Serpentine Pavilion, by Mexico City studio LANZA atelier. Isabel Abascal and Arienzo didn't invent a shape. They borrowed a fruit-garden wall found predominantly in East Anglia, especially Suffolk.
Why a wall that bends can stand
The crinkle-crankle, or serpentine, wall is a working wall. Historic England's thesaurus defines it as "a wall for growing fruit, dating in England from the mid-18th century, whose curving lines gave added strength, thus doing away with the need for buttressing". The walled garden at the Royal Hospital School in Holbrook, Suffolk, has one, and Historic England notes that the type, using fewer bricks, was often a response to the Brick Tax of 1784 to 1850.
Abascal puts the engineering simply in a video Dezeen produced for the Serpentine: "When you have a straight brick wall, you need to have at least two lines of bricks to prevent the straight wall from toppling down," whereas with a wavy wall, "the waves make that wall very stable, so you can have only one line of bricks." In John D. Cook's worked example, a sine-wave wall is 22% longer than a straight one, but at one brick thick it still uses about 39% less brick than a straight wall two bricks thick. The curve gives a thin wall the depth that thickness or buttresses would otherwise provide.
What LANZA changed
The plan came out of the site. Abascal told Frieze that "you cannot create any foundation or build closer to the tree canopy than one metre," so the studio's first drawing outlined the canopy, and that line became one wall. Needing a second wall, they turned to historical British construction and the crinkle-crankle. As Arienzo puts it: "We didn't want to invent a shape; it was like a reaction to the site."
The Serpentine's own description sets out the layout. The crinkle-crankle forms the south wall; the north wall curves around the nearby tree canopy; and a translucent roof rests on brick columns that "evoke a grove of trees". Brick was chosen to celebrate the English garden tradition and to answer the brick façade of the Serpentine South Gallery, a former tea pavilion. Serpentine calls it the first Pavilion to use brick, with single-brick columns that leave gaps for views and sunlight. ArchDaily describes the column system shifting "from solid to porous", with the wave reworked to organise circulation and frame views.
The material is deliberately ordinary. Arienzo describes "using a standard brick – nothing special – but using it in a sophisticated way to construct a space". LANZA also designed the furniture, chairs and stools in sapele, which ArchDaily reads as the same architectural logic at the scale of objects.
The case against
Give the critics their due, because the garden record is mixed. In 1757 Thomas Hitt found that curved walls generated heat for fruit trees but, as garden historian Jean O'Neill's research is summarised, the advantage was outweighed by strong winds rebounding from side to side and damaging tender shoots. By 1825, J. C. Loudon reported serpentine walls "generally disapproved of as creating eddies". The heritage blog Gardens, Heritage and Planning notes that the type takes more land than a straight two-brick wall, probably costs more in labour, and is vulnerable to impact, citing a car that damaged the country's longest crinkle-crankle wall in 2013.
And a summer pavilion proves less than it seems. The Holbrook walled garden dates from the late 18th or early 19th century; this wall has to last a season. Durability, weathering and repair aren't being tested in Kensington Gardens.
The TDW house view
Still, this is borrowing worth copying, from a discipline architects rarely look at. Kitchen-garden builders solved a structural problem (stability with less material) under an economic constraint (often a tax on bricks) for a growing goal (warmth for fruit). LANZA keeps the structural logic and turns it into a spatial one. Arienzo's own summary is "less structure, less material, more economic", and Abascal adds that they "aim to use a wall as a space for gathering".
The lesson travels. The curve that saved bricks for 18th-century gardeners can save material, and the carbon that goes with it, today. T. H. Thomas, quoted on the same blog, estimates savings in material, firing energy and carbon footprint of "up to 50%" for walls built mainly half a brick thick on a plan that gives full-brick stiffness. If you design landscapes, facades or products, the move is the same: before adding mass, ask whether shape can do the job.
The Serpentine Pavilion 2026 makes that case at full scale, in standard brick, on a public lawn.
Three weeks left
The Pavilion is open daily until 25 October 2026, and entry is free. Walk the south wall, then look at the columns. One shows you how a garden wall stands; the other shows what LANZA did with it.
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