In Kensington Gardens in central London from June 15 to October 7, 2018, the role of the "gazebo" and cafe, and in the evening - the space for discussions and concerts will again play the temporary pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery located there. Her famous architectural program began in 2000 with the participation of Zaha Hadid, and since then, every year, commissioned by this art institute, an architect, who has not yet built anything in the UK, designs a summer building, which at the end of the season is dismantled and sold at a charity auction.
For a long time, the most famous architects of the world were invited to participate, from Niemeyer and Gehry to Siza and Zumthor, but since 2013 the organizers have changed their policy, paying attention to novice architects and significantly expanding the geography of their searches. Selected this time, 39-year-old Frida Escobedo is the youngest participant in this project during its existence. Its realizations include the library of the Octavio Paz Foundation in Mexico City and the expansion of the museum-workshop of the muralist David Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, as well as a number of urban projects to “activate” urban space.
For London, she combined Mexican and English motives. The pavilion will receive a patio and openwork walls, reminiscent of the residential architecture of Escobedo's native Mexico City. At the same time, they will be folded from British concrete tiles, and the pavilion itself will be oriented strictly to the north - like the zero meridian passing nearby, in the Royal Observatory of Greenwich. This axis in the patio is marked by the boundary of a shallow body of water. The second mirrored surface there will be the reflective slabs. Despite the overall originality of the project, he
recalls the 2011 pavilion by Peter Zumthor.
