The Wall That Stands Because It Wavers: LANZA's Crinkle-Crankle Serpentine Pavilion

A wall that stands because it wavers

Every summer the Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens hands a temporary building to an architect who has never built in Britain. For 2026, the commission's twenty-fifth year, that architect is LANZA, the Mexico City studio founded in 2015 by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo. Their pavilion, called 'a serpentine', opened on 6 June and stays up until late October. What makes it worth a second look is not a spectacular silhouette but a quiet act of borrowing: LANZA built the whole structure around a piece of eighteenth-century English garden engineering that most visitors will have walked past without ever noticing.

That device is the crinkle-crankle wall, also called a serpentine, ribbon or wavy wall. Instead of running straight, it snakes in a continuous series of alternating curves. The counter-intuitive payoff is structural. A straight garden wall one brick thick will topple under its own slenderness and needs buttresses or a second layer of brick to stand. Curve that same wall, and the sinuous plan does the buttressing for it: each bend braces the next, the way a flat sheet of paper collapses on its edge but holds firm once folded into an accordion. The result is a wall that can be a single wythe, one brick, thick and still resist the wind, which means it uses fewer bricks than the straight two-brick wall it replaces.

From Suffolk kitchen gardens to Kensington Gardens

The form has a deep and slightly comic history. Versions appear in ancient Egypt, but the English wavy wall arrived with Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century and took root in East Anglia; the county of Suffolk alone still claims around a hundred surviving examples. They were working walls, not ornaments. Gardeners prized the curves because the south-facing pockets trapped sun and shelter, coaxing peaches and other tender fruit through an English summer, while the whole thing cost less brick than a conventional boundary. Thomas Jefferson admired the logic enough to line the gardens of the University of Virginia with serpentine walls a single brick thick.

LANZA's move is to lift this humble agrarian trick out of the kitchen garden and make it the governing idea of a public room. The pavilion's curving brick wall defines three sides of the space and reaches out past the enclosure toward Serpentine South, the 1934 former tea pavilion whose own brick facade the new wall is built to answer. The name works on two levels: it names the wall type, and it nods to the nearby Serpentine Lake, whose slow bend gave the gallery and this whole stretch of parkland its name in the first place.

Brick as a conversation with the ground

Brick is not an obvious material for a Serpentine Pavilion. Recent editions have reached for mirrored steel, timber lattices, translucent membranes and cork. LANZA chose brick precisely because it is ordinary and because it talks to what is already there: the red masonry of the gallery behind it and the long English tradition of the garden wall. Over that heavy, grounded base the studio floats something light, a translucent roof carried on slender brick columns arranged, in the architects' description, like a grove of trees. The roof itself is a spatial steel grid filled with polycarbonate panels and fabric fins that strain the daylight, so the space underneath is enclosed and open at once, shaded but never dark, with sky and air slipping through the gaps between the columns.

That pairing, a wavy load-bearing wall of solid brick against a roof that behaves like a leaf canopy, is the pavilion's real argument. It says a shelter can be made from the plainest builder's materials and still feel generous, if the geometry is doing the thinking.

LANZA's architecture of encounter

The choice fits the studio. Abascal and Arienzo describe their work as rooted in the everyday and the informal, drawn to how craft and spatial intelligence surface in unglamorous conditions. Their built portfolio is deliberately modest in budget and ambitious in idea: a run of public kiosks and toilets threaded along a bike path in Ecatepec, built from cinderblock punched with skylights; exhibition designs for institutions such as Museo Jumex; residential work handled with the same care they bring to a gallery. They insist on calling exhibition design exhibition architecture, refusing the usual hierarchy that treats a temporary display as lesser work. A crinkle-crankle wall, cheap, clever, born of use rather than image, is exactly the kind of overlooked intelligence their practice likes to foreground.

Why the trick still matters

There is a lesson in the pavilion that outlasts its five-month run. At a moment when architecture is under pressure to account for every brick it lays, the serpentine wall is a reminder that older builders already knew how to do more with less, that form itself, not extra material, can carry a load. A wall that wavers to stay standing, and saves brick while it does so, is a small piece of low-tech structural wisdom hiding in plain sight in a hundred Suffolk gardens. LANZA's contribution is to notice it, and to build a room that lets a summer's worth of visitors notice it too.