Architect Frida Escobedo, celebrated for her 2018 Serpentine Pavilion, was in conversation with architect and educator Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, discussing the material and historical inspirations behind this year's Serpentine Pavilion and the expression of time in architecture.
Frida Escobedo, architect of the 18th Serpentine Pavilion, said:
 
The enclosed design for the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion departs from an apparently simple gesture,  the nesting of two rectangular volumes positioned at an angle. While the outer walls are aligned in  parallel to  the Serpentine  Gallery’s  eastern  façade, the axis of the internal courtyard is aligned  directly to the north. The creation of an internal courtyard is a common feature of Mexican domestic  architecture, and the pivoted axis refers to the Prime Meridian established in 1851 at the Royal  Observatory in nearby Greenwich, the global standard marker of time and geographical distance. The  intersecting planes produced by this  simple rotation produce a series of irregular shapes and  defined boundaries, with each area within the Pavilion encouraging play, circulation, contemplation  and conversation.  

The lattice walls of the Pavilion are inspired by a  celosia, a traditional breeze wall  commonly used  in Mexican domestic architecture to bring air and light into the home. Here they are composed of  cement roof tiles commonly used in the United Kingdom, arranged into a pattern that diffuses the  visitor’s view,  transforming Kensington Gardens into a blur of greens and blues. The selection of  materials, which have a dark colour and textured surface have  been chosen for their contrast with  these environs.  

Two reflective elements inside the Pavilion  emphasise the movement of light and  shadow within the Pavilion over the course of the day. The curved  underside of  the canopy over the central space is clad with mirrored panels,  throwing  reflected light across the space. To compliment the canopy, a  triangular mirror  pool cast into the foundation of the Pavilion traces its boundary directly beneath the edge of the roof, along the north axis. This thin veneer of water, only 5mm  deep, provides a shifting reflection of the sky and surrounding treeline and roof  of the Serpentine Gallery.  

The movement of the sun across the sky, reflected and refracted by the pool and  mirrored ceiling, encourages an aw areness of time spent in shared  experience  and in contemplation. The design aligns material and historical inspirations from Mexico and the UK with a concept that has been central to our practice from the beginning — the expression of time in architecture through inventive  use of everyday materials and simple forms. For the  Serpentine Pavilion, we add the  materials of  light and shadow, reflection and  refraction, turning the building into a timepiece that charts the  passage of the day.
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Frida Escobedo (b. 1979, Mexico City) founded her practice in 2006, after four years as co-director of the architectural firm Perro Rojo. Her award-winning work has focused mainly on reactivating urban spaces that are considered to be residual or forgotten.

In 2004 she was awarded the Scholarship for Young Creators by the National Fund for Arts and Culture (FONCA) and in 2008 she was selected by Herzog & de Meuron as one of the architectural studios to participate in the Ordos 100 Project in Inner Mongolia, China. In 2009, she was a winner of the Young Architects Forum, organised by the Architectural League of New York. In 2013, she was selected as one of the three finalists for the Architecture programme at the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was nominated for the Arc Vision Prize for Women and the Iakov Chernikhov Prize. In 2014, she was selected as a finalist for the Designs of the Year at the Design Museum in London and was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize of the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2014, she won the Ibero-American Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism Prize (IX BIAU) in Rosario, Argentina. In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural League of New York.
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Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He was formerly Dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University and Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He has taught at numerous institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).

Dean Mostafavi serves on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the board of the Van Alen Institute, and has served on the design committees of the London Development Agency (LDA) and the RIBA Gold Medal. He is a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects.  His publications include On Weathering (MIT, 1993); Delayed Space (Princeton, 1994); Approximations (AA/MIT, 2002); Surface Architecture (MIT, 2002); Logique Visuelle (Idea Books, 2003); Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (AA Publications, 2004); Structure as Space (AA Publications, 2006); Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers/Harvard GSD, 2010); Implicate & Explicate (Lars Müller Publishers, 2011); and Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (Rizzoli, 2011).

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Marina Otero Verzier is head of the social design masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The program focuses on roles for designers attuned to contemporary ecological and social challenges. From 2015 to 2022, she was the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch Institute for Architecture, Design, and Digital Culture. At HNI, she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective, including “Automated Landscapes,” “BURN OUT: Exhaustion on a Planetary Scale,” and “Lithium.”

Otero received an MS in critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices in architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 2013 and completed her Ph.D. at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid in 2016. She is a co-editor of Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and More-than-Human (2020); and editor of Work, Body, Leisure (2018).

Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse explores innovations in data-storing architectures attuned to social and ecological challenges, land availability, the growing cost of energy, and changing data. Otero will commence her research and data collection this summer, followed by site visits to Iceland and Sweden, both global leaders in renewable energy. Chile, a country that is currently a testbed for distributed edge cloud models and the world's second-largest producer of lithium, a critical element for efficient data center batteries, will also be on the early travel itinerary. With the construction of the Humboldt Cable, the first submarine cable between Latin America and Oceania, Chile will soon become a preferred data location. Additional proposed travel locations include Singapore, Australia, Nigeria, and California. Otero has already conducted fieldwork in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.
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Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is co-director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup’ (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 exhibitions. Obrist’s recent publications include A Brief History of Curating, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks with Rem Koolhaas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, Do It: The Compendium, Think Like Clouds, Ai Weiwei Speaks, Sharp Tongues - Loose Lips - Open Eyes - Ears to the Ground, along with new volumes of his Conversation Series.

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