In a way, the Serpentine Pavilion is architecture's own version of a limited release. Each year, an architect who has never built in the UK is commissioned to design a temporary structure — which means every edition is, by default, someone's UK debut.The structure goes up in June on the lawn of Kensington Gardens, runs through October, then gets sold on and disappears. That scarcity formula has made it a must-visit, and it's almost as if the timed in-situ period of the pavilion is equivalent to the scheduled on-sale window.Since 2000, 25 editions of the Serpentine Pavilion have been commissioned. The rest are standing somewhere on a private estate, a campus, or a museum garden.The most recent comes from Mexico City-based Lanza Atelier, who launched their pavilion earlier this month and had us looking through the archives. Here, you'll find all of the pavilions past and present. Zaha Hadid, 2000The programme began as a practical problem: the Serpentine needed a structure to host its 30th anniversary fundraising dinner and asked Hadid to design it. What she delivered was a 600sqm steel-and-aluminium canopy with a triangulated roof that fractured into sharp geometric planes at different angles and heights.It was Hadid's first built project in the UK, and was constructed in six weeks. The rule that every subsequent pavilion would be the architect’s UK debut started here, almost by accident.Daniel Libeskind, 2001Libeskind's pavilion, titled Eighteen Turns, was made from a series of sheer metallic planes folded together in an origami-like sequence. As visitors moved through the structure, the angled panels compressed and opened the space around them, creating a different experience from every direction.Toyo Ito, 2002Ito and engineer Cecil Balmond generated the pavilion's form using an algorithm applied to a rotating cube. The resulting structure was a steel-and-glass shell made up of triangular panels, which caught the light differently at every hour of the day.Oscar Niemeyer, 2003Niemeyer, then 95, designed a clean white concrete volume raised 1.5 metres off the ground on a single central column, reached by a long curving ramp and a staircase. The elevated form created a shaded outdoor space beneath it and a simple, open auditorium above — characteristic of the formal language Niemeyer had been developing since the 1940s.MVRDV (unbuilt), 2004Dutch firm MVRDV were commissioned but their design (a large mountainous structure rising several metres above the lawn) could not be realised within the programme's budget and six-month build window. It remains the only commission in the pavilion's history that was never built.Álvaro Siza & Eduardo Souto de Moura, 2005The two Portuguese architects based the pavilion on a rectangular grid that was progressively bent and distorted to produce a curving, wave-like timber structure. The interlocking beams crossed at varying angles overhead, creating a latticed ceiling that filtered light and changed character across the plan. The design was intended as a direct response to the neoclassical Serpentine Gallery building next to it.Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond, 2006Koolhaas' pavilion had two parts: a circular enclosure at ground level with polycarbonate walls, and a large inflatable ovoid canopy suspended above it that could be raised to float over the space or lowered to fully enclose it. At night the canopy was lit from within, and Koolhaas used the space to run 24-hour interview programmes with artists, politicians, and architects.Olafur Eliasson & Kjetil Thorsen, 2007Eliasson and Thorsen built a wide wooden spiral ramp that twisted upward from the ground to a platform around six metres high, giving the structure a spinning, gyroscopic appearance from the outside. Visitors who climbed to the top looked back at the Serpentine Gallery framed below them – reversing the usual relationship between a building and its pavilion.Frank Gehry, 2008Gehry's pavilion was a timber-and-steel structure with large overlapping roof planes set at irregular heights and angles, supported by an exposed steel frame. A curved wooden reflective panel at one end was designed to improve acoustics for the evening concert programme. Despite being a prolific architect for decades before, it was his first completed building in England.SANAA, 2009SANAA created serenity with their pavilion, and designed a single large aluminium roof and polished it to a mirror finish so that it reflected the park and sky above visitors as they walked beneath it. The roof was supported by slender steel columns placed in no particular pattern and open on all sides, with no enclosing walls.Jean Nouvel, 2010Nouvel painted the entire pavilion a single saturated red – inspired, he said, by London's red buses and phone boxes – and built it from a composition of cantilevered roof planes, columns of varying heights, and walls and a roof made from red glass. The colour created a sharp contrast against the green of Kensington Gardens, making the building visible from across the park.Peter Zumthor with Piet Oudolf, 2011Zumthor's pavilion, titled “A Garden in a Garden”, was a dark rectangular timber structure that enclosed a bright open-air garden at its centre. Visitors entered through a narrow gap in the outer wall, moved through a dim covered corridor, and emerged into a lush interior courtyard planted by garden designer Piet Oudolf with a dense mix of perennials and grasses that changed across the summer as different plants came into bloom.Herzog & de Meuron & Ai Weiwei, 2012Rather than building upward, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei dug into the site, excavating sections of the lawn to expose the layered ground beneath and reveal the compacted foundations left by every previous pavilion. Twelve steel columns rose from the excavated floor, one for each past edition, and supported a flat circular roof positioned at eye level. The result was a partially subterranean space that made the history of the programme physically present.Sou Fujimoto, 2013Fujimoto's pavilion was a cloud-like lattice of thin white steel poles, each one about the diameter of a finger. The structure was see-through from every angle, with no walls or defined interior, tapering and thinning at the edges so that it dissolved into the surrounding landscape rather than ending at a clear boundary.Smiljan Radić, 2014For his pavilion, Radić balanced a large cylindrical shell of white translucent fibreglass on a collection of rough, uncut quarry stones. The fibreglass was thin enough to let diffuse light through the walls, giving the interior a soft, even glow. Inside, the space was arranged around a central open-air patio, with covered seating in the ring around it.SelgasCano, 2015Maybe the most colorful pavilion on the list, SelgasCano built a tunnel-like structure from steel arches wrapped in two layers of ETFE foil – one translucent white on the inside and one printed with colours on the outside. As sunlight passed through the two layers, the colours mixed and shifted throughout the day, changing the interior from yellow to green to blue depending on the angle of the light.Bjarke Ingels Group, 2016BIG created a zip-like structure, stacking 1,800 hollow fibreglass bricks into a single continuous wall that split into two curving sides and arched overhead. Because the bricks were hollow and open at both ends, the wall read as solid when viewed straight on and transparent when viewed at an angle. The 2016 edition also introduced four smaller Summerhouse structures by other architects placed around the grounds, marking the first time the programme had expanded beyond a single commission.Diébédo Francis Kéré, 2017Kéré based the pavilion on the large communal tree at the centre of his hometown of Gando, Burkina Faso, under which people gather during the heat of the day. The structure had a wide, funnel-shaped indigo steel roof that extended far beyond the walls below to provide shade around the perimeter, with a central opening that collected rainwater and channelled it down through the main column, a technique drawn from traditional building methods in the region.Frida Escobedo, 2018Escobedo built a courtyard enclosed by walls made from standard UK concrete roof tiles stacked to create a latticed surface of tiles and gaps that let fragmented light and air through. A mirrored ceiling above the covered section reflected the tile pattern back from above, and a shallow triangular pool at one end reflected the sky.Junya Ishigami, 2019Bringing a slice of northern England to London, Ishigami covered the pavilion roof in around 61 tonnes of raw Cumbrian slate, laid in overlapping layers across a gently sloping surface that appeared to rise directly out of the park's ground at its lowest edge. Beneath the slate, 106 very slender steel columns held the roof up — placed in an irregular, forest-like arrangement with no repeating pattern. From a distance, the heavy stone roof appeared to float, and underneath, the space was low, dark, and enclosed like a cave.Sumayya Vally / Counterspace, 2021Vally's pavilion was made from CNC-cut plywood coated in pink and grey micro-cement, arranged not as a single enclosed building but as a series of fragmented elements spread across the lawn. The shapes and geometries were drawn from research into informal gathering spaces across London such as mosques, community bookshops, sound system venues and market stalls.Theaster Gates, 2022Artist Theaster Gates created a 16-metre-wide cylinder from horizontally stacked blackened timber joists, with a conical roof opening. The interior was a single circular room with seating around the perimeter and an oculus overhead open to the sky. Gates designed the space specifically for sound, and the cylindrical form and timber lining were tuned for live performance. Across its time in the park, the “Black Chapel” hosted music, readings, and communal gatherings, with Gates describing it as a space in the tradition of small nonconformist chapels.Lina Ghotmeh, 2023Ghotmeh's “À Table” was a nine-sided pavilion with walls built from timber screens, which had been perforated with leaf-shaped cutouts that filtered park light into shifting patterns on the interior floor. Inside, the space was arranged around a single long communal table. Ghotmeh described the pavilion as being about the act of gathering around a table as the most fundamental form of human architecture.Minsuk Cho / Mass Studies, 2024This pavilion was organised as five separate enclosed or semi-enclosed structures arranged around a central open courtyard, which was left deliberately empty. This particular detail was in reference to the madang — the open-air centre of a traditional Korean house, understood as the social heart of the home rather than unused space. Each of the five surrounding structures was developed with a different artist, composer, or archivist, giving each one a distinct character, making it feel like a small village rather than a single building.Marina Tabassum, 2025An existing tree formed the centerpiece for Tabassum's pavilion, which took on a a long rectangular arched form, clad in translucent polycarbonate panels. Because the structure was never “closed”, it was always open to the park on all sides, and after its life in London’s greenery, it was set to become a library somewhere else. "Architecture has always sought out permanence," Tabassum said at the time. "In my pavilion, the idea of timelessness changes definition."Lanza Atelier, 2026Earlier this month, Lanza Atelier unveiled 2026’s pavilion, which is inspired by an architectural feature known as a “serpentine” - a type of brick wall commonly found in English county of Suffolk, but is a detail that actually originates in ancient Egypt. Made up of over 30,000 red-hued bricks, the installation snakes around the gardens and is filled with furniture also designed by the studio.