22nd Serpentine Pavilion by Lina Ghotmeh to Open on Friday, 9 June 2023

The Serpentine is set to unveil its 22nd Pavilion, named À table, on Friday, June 9th, 2023. The pavilion was created by Lina Ghotmeh, a French-Lebanese architect who works in Paris. The project has been supported by Goldman Sachs for nine consecutive years.

À table was inspired by the architect's Mediterranean heritage and lively conversations around the table about current affairs, politics, personal lives, and dreams. The French phrase encourages people to sit down together and engage in dialogue while sharing a meal. The Pavilion's interior features a concentric table along the perimeter, inviting individuals to come together, think, share, and celebrate exchanges that foster new relationships.

Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine.

Considering food as an expression of care, the Pavilion’s design is a space for grounding and reflection on our relationship to land, nature and environment. By offering a moment of conviviality around a table, Ghotmeh welcomes us to share the ideas, concerns, joys, dissatisfactions, responsibilities, traditions, cultural memories, and histories that bring us together. 

Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine.

Lina Ghotmeh, Architect said: “À table is an invitation to dwell together, in the same space and around the same table. It is an encouragement to enter into a dialogue, to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and the Earth.

The Earth that embraces us is our first source of sustenance; without it, we living beings, could not survive. Rethinking what and how much we eat – how we ‘consume’ and how we weave our relationships to one another and the living world – moves us towards a more sustainable, ecosystemic communion with the Earth. Our ‘cuisine’ grounds us home; it reminds us how linked we are to the climates in which we grew up.

Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine.

As a Mediterranean woman, born and raised in Beirut, and living in Paris, I feel a deep belonging to our ground, to what it contains, and to what it embraces: from the buried yet weathering archaeologies of past civilisations to the embedded living world that spurs green life to sprout from every crack in the streets. In my practice as an architect, I excavate to design (and learn) from the traces of the past and I listen to the voices of my ancestors as well as those of our living world. These voices vividly resonate with future structures as ways to influence and challenge tomorrow’s architecture.

In today’s changing times, this Pavilion offers a celebratory space. It is endowed with a table, around which we will sit together in a modest, low structure and in an atmosphere reminiscent of Toguna huts of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, designed to bring all members of a community together in discussion. Here we can eat, work, play, meet, talk, rethink, and decide. Built with bio-sourced and low-carbon materials, the structure appears like a skeleton. Sustainably sourced timber ribs are arranged to support a suspended pleated roof. Echoing the structures of tree leaves, the Pavilion embraces the nature of the park in which it emerges. Reminding us of the many lives blossoming beneath our feet, the concave lines of its perimeter are drawn from the forms in the stems and canopies of adjacent trees. While rooted in its place and welcoming the space of the park with its open gallery-like envelope, the Pavilion grows as an adaptable system. It can be disassembled and reassembled, allowing it to live beyond its Serpentine site, while holding the memory of its original ground.”

Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine.

Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine.