The Serpentine 2026: a crinkle-crankle wall and a swaying interactive yellow sculpture

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9 hours ago

The Serpentine: a crinkle-crankle wall and a swaying interactive yellow sculpture

Located in Kensington Gardens in central London, the Serpentine Pavilion serves up a new architectural design every year.

This year’s pavilion was designed by the Mexico City-based architecture studio LANZA atelier and features a distinctive brick “crinkle-crankle” wall design.

Adjacent to the pavilion can be found a fun kinetic sculpture, titled ‘Pénétrable BBL Jaune’, created by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto.

Both are free to visit until October 25 2026.

The Guardian goes into some detail to explain how the curved walls work:

Mathematicians might describe them as sinusoidal, while structural engineers would point to their elegant economy of materials: the curvilinear form provides inherent stability and resists lateral forces, creating a robust structure that requires only a single layer of bricks, with no need for additional buttressing.

If constructed on an east-west axis, as is the case here, the south-facing side catches the sun, generating warmth for the historic cultivation of fruit trees and prolonging the growing season.

Made up of 4,000 spaghetti-like identical PVC tubes suspended from a steel frame, the ‘Pénétrable BBL Jaune’ sculpture has proved a hit with kids and adults. although there’s a guard situated nearby to stop people tying the strands up into knots.

The Thunderstruck Tree is based on a hundred-year-old willow that grew in Belgium, with the sculpture depicting a willow tree struck by lightning with its ‘wounds’ decorated with gold.