“Architect and educator” is the formula that now almost ritually accompanies the figure of Marina Tabassum, the designer of the Serpentine Pavilion 2025, which will celebrate the quarter-century anniversary of the installation project inaugurated by Zaha Hadid in 2000.

Born in Dhaka in 1969, Tabassum both studied and began her professional practice in Bangladesh, first founding the studio URBANA with Kashef Chowdhury – they won the competition for the Independence Monument and Museum of Bangladesh in 1997 – and then her own studio, Mta, in 2005.

She has become a figure providing a 21st-century definition to the notion of the “global architect”: no longer the Modern-era head of a firm that exports a univocal model of architecture across the world but a practitioner who roots their design and research work in a local dimension, confronting social issues such as climate, context, culture and history, and then putting this work into dialogue with those from other contexts.

This exchange stems from Tabassum’s academic work – she has taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the University of Toronto, currently teaches at TU Delft in the Netherlands and has received a honorary doctorate from the University of Munich – and from her curatorial work, which is once again understood as research: this was demonstrated by her Wisdom of the Land, the Bangladeshi courtyard created in the Arsenale for the 2018 Venice Biennale from work developed with local communities. And this is confirmed by the numerous awards she has received in addition to the Serpentine commission, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016, or Time Magazine’s nomination as one the 100 most influential people, the most influential architect together with Lesley Lokko.

Tabassum’s projects shaped a contemporary language born of an awareness of context as cultural and environmental expression: The Bait Ur Rouf Mosque, winner of the Aga Khan Award, sought the essence of Islam as space, beyond mysticism and ritual; residential and commercial buildings such as the Comfort Reverie and the Ar Tower in Dhaka are climate-responsive geometries that seek to contribute to the consolidation of the cityscape; The elevated houses – a response to the rising water levels on the Bangladeshi coastal areas – brought to the Sharjah Triennale, or the hut that brings precariousness right at the heart of the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, are projects that, in their globetrotting, provoke reflection.

More than a practice of building from scratch, Tabassum’s practice dives deep into processes, in a transformation of them that responds to contemporary emergencies: the beginning of our century must be a “RE-“ phase, she has written during the pandemic, in a letter to young architects on Architectural Review: “to rethink and re-evaluate our actions, to revisit, recall, research and reconnect with the age-old wisdoms to reorient, reinstall, revise our living patterns by reuse, reduce, repair, recycle, repurpose through a process of regression and resistance in order to re-establish the balance to reassure our existence”.

Rethinking before producing anew; processes and contexts before forms: these are positions that can say a lot about Tabassum’s approach, but also about a kind of discourse that has been at the forefront of architecture in recent years. 

And it can also tell us a lot about an evolution in the language the various Serpentine Pavilions have spoken over these 25 years. Few distances can be as clear as that separating 2000, when form was everything, fundamental to expressing a somehow digital-futurist enthusiasm, and 2025, when form has receded into the background, and the actions, the discourses that form must contain have instead become everything. 

Opening image: Portrait of Marina Tabassum © Asif Salman