It follows Therme Group’s acquisitions of 2019 and 2018 Pavilions designed by Junya Ishigami and Frida Escobedo, respectively, and highlights the many shared values connecting Therme Group’s holistic vision of urban planning and the pioneering architecture programme. For Therme Group, the Serpentine Pavilion programme represents a paradigm of creative design – a template for a new kind of city founded on creativity, inclusion and sustainability.

Therme Group’s acquisition of the 2021 Pavilion is part a growing portfolio of creative partnerships and joint ventures led by its international cultural initiative Therme Art, which has worked with Serpentine since 2018. The productive collaboration is founded in a shared ambition to work across disciplines and to forge new alliances beyond art. 

The Pavilion was designed to reference places of meeting, organizing and belonging that are particularly relevant to migrant communities in London. The forms in the Pavilion are a result of abstracting, superimposing and splicing architectural elements, varying in scales of intimacy, from various locations, translating the shapes of London into the Pavilion structure in Kensington Gardens. During the summer, fragments of the Pavilion will be installed in neighbourhoods across the city, to support and facilitate gatherings and impromptu interactions, to honour the history of places which have held communities over time. A specially commissioned sound programme for the Pavilion, Listening to the City, will feature work by artists including Ain Bailey and Jay Bernard, connecting visitors to the stories and sounds of lost spaces across London.