| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Feargus O’Sullivan, a London-based writer and editor at CityLab, filling in for Kriston Capps. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  This year's Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Marina Tabassum and her firm Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe This June, one of the most discussed fixtures in Britain’s architectural calendar turns 25. The Serpentine Pavilion is a temporary gazebo that has risen on the lawns of London’s Serpentine Gallery — typically to some international media fanfare — since the year 2000, with designs commissioned each year by a different prominent or up-and-coming architect. With former designers including Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Bjarke Ingels, these eye-catching pavilions function as event spaces, architectural conversation pieces and platforms to publicize its host galleries, which show small, often excellent temporary art exhibitions in West London’s Kensington Gardens. Located in an idyllic parkland setting barely two stones’ throw from Princess Diana’s former home at Kensington Palace, the pavilion is also a minor tourist attraction during its brief summer tenure. Despite all these roles, these pavilions’ functions tend to be calculatedly less significant than their form, giving people a chance to look at and discuss a structure without thinking too much about its use.  An aerial view of the Serpentine Pavilion in 2019, when Japanese Architect Junya Ishigami was chosen to design the installation. Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images Europe In recent years, the project has chosen architects who are under-exposed internationally — such as this year’s choice, the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum. A look back at Tabassum’s career shows that her work deserves the greater international attention the pavilion might grant it. Her buildings in her native Bangladesh, often using local materials, showed thoughtful, productive concern with sustainability before such concern was entirely mainstream. Her 1997 Museum of Independence in Dhaka, for example, sought to preserve the greenness of its site in a former Mughal garden by locating the galleries below ground, illuminated from above by a tall “tower of light” that also functioned as a memorial to those who died in Bangladesh’s War of Independence.  A “Khudi Bari,” a mobile modular shelter, designed by Tabassum. Photographer: Munir UZ ZAMAN/AFP via Getty Images Her dome-less, minaret-less Baitur Rauf Mosque, completed in 2012, was built to function not just as a place of worship but as a naturally cool, informal social space for a low-income Dhaka neighborhood. She has also developed a semi-temporary stilt house kit costing just $500 called the Khudi Bari (“small house” in Bengali) in collaboration with an NGO, aimed at regions where flood risks make people wary of sinking money into high-quality housing. In photo form, all these projects come across as good ideas: resourceful, often beautiful and built with respect for their users. It is not easy, however, to see how this legacy translates effectively in Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion, entitled A Capsule in Time. A long vault divided by small open sections around a gingko tree and glazed with vaguely 1970s-looking smoked brown glass, the pavilion draws its inspiration from South Asian shamianas — usually open-sided event tents which, like the pavilion, shield from the sun but provide still-bright, filtered light. The gaps between the sections can in fact be closed when it rains by a motor beneath the floor.  This year's Serpentine Pavilion, A Capsule in Time. Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe There’s a likable sort of Boogie Nights Brutalism to the zig-zag smoked glass vault, but it seems a little odd to expend so much effort creating a motor to close up the hall’s sections. The glass and wood beams also lack the lightness that seems to be typical of Tabassum’s other work. More nagging, however, is not a flaw in the design but a slight sense of purposelessness to the project. A West London event space that feels mainly intended for people to waft around with champagne flutes may not be the most pertinent venue to explore contemporary architecture or its role right now. -Feargus O’Sullivan Design stories we’re reading | Washington’s always lured the ultra-rich. These homes tell the story. (Washington Post) Public access to the former US embassy on Grosvenor Square in London is being rescinded by luxury hotel group developers (The Standard) Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89 (New York Times) Parks like the High Line lower the temperature in cities (Fast Company) An exclusive look into the early stages of LACMA’s David Geffen galleries (Architectural Digest) | 
