In London, at the heart of Kensington Gardens where Serpentine South stands, a new public art project is about to come to life: it’s called the Play Pavilion, an immersive installation designed by architect and Archigram co-founder Peter Cook. The initiative, which places architecture at the service of play, is promoted by Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with the Lego Group and will be inaugurated on June 11 to mark World Play Day.

Cook’s project takes the form of a playful and interactive pavilion, designed to spark imagination and active participation from the public – particularly families, children, and teenagers. The iconic Lego bricks, used to create colorful, biomorphic forms, will be an integral part of this architectural structure, contributing to a three-dimensional environment where the experience of play becomes a vehicle for connection and collective creativity.

The Play Pavilion fits into Serpentine’s long-standing tradition of commissioning a temporary summer pavilion from a renowned international architect —such as Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels, Francis Kéré, Lina Ghotmeh, among others—turning the park into a laboratory of architectural experimentation. However, unlike these past projects which are more formally or conceptually driven, Peter Cook’s new pavilion places direct interaction with the public at its core, continuing a recent trajectory focused on community engagement initiated in recent years with Alvaro Barrington’s basketball court installation in Bethnal Green.

Peter Cook

The Play Pavilion thus represents a new chapter in this vision, where Peter Cook’s radical design language resonates with art and public space, restoring significance to leisure and play as forms of cultural and social expression.