Serpentine Pavilion 2018 & Aesop

An exploration of architecture and our surrounds

Please note that the continuing page will be displayed in English only.

At once public forum and platform for experimentation, the annual architectural commission by London-based Serpentine Galleries sparks conversations about our relationship to architecture. This year’s Pavilion design, by Frida Escobedo, contemplates time through refractions and shadows. Drawing on both Mexican and British context and history, the structure interplays light, water and geometry to allow quiet reflection on the passage of the day.

On this occasion, our literary publication, The Fabulist, further examines materiality and space. Alongside essays by Geoff Dyer, Rachel Kushner, Valeria Luiselli, and Zadie Smith, this issue features an interview with Frida Escobedo, discussing her influences and Mexican constructions.

Frida Escobedo has previously collaborated with Aesop, most notably on our signature stores in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District and Chicago’s West Loop. She is currently working on a sixth Aesop store in Brooklyn, New York City.

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The Serpentine Pavilion 2018 in London's Kensington Gardens, designed by architect Frida Escobedo

Aesop’s literary digest, The Fabulist

Literature to complement a sense of space

Presented in partnership with the Serpentine Galleries, this twenty-third issue of The Fabulist gathers essays that question materiality and the meaning of our surrounds.

Explore the issue

A printed version of The Fabulist is available to collect at the Serpentine Pavilion 2018 and from select Aesop stores around the world.

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Letter of Introduction

What memory, asks Valeria Luiselli in her essay on Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, can be held within a slab of stone? What is washed away when the flood comes, and how can rubble make an architect?

Read more●

Alejandro Zambra
An Interview with Frida Escobedo

"Make everything more flexible in every way, so that the building becomes more like a palm tree and less like a completely rigid structure, because that’s the one that will fall down. Rigid things collapse. The rest can move, yes, it transforms, it may lose sections, but its spirit will remain."

Read more●

Photograph of Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City

Valeria Luiselli
A Map of Marble, Steel, and Water

Bellas Artes is a three-dimensional map of Mexico City. It’s a kind of hologram, or a Borgesian Aleph that contains, in its limited space, the entire history of the city’s many amphibian lives, real and imagined.

Read more●

Photograph of Donatello, Bust of Niccolò da Uzzano, 1430s Polychromed terracotta

Zadie Smith
Life Finds a Way

Even when we try to ignore the fact that we are, along with dolphins and apes, one of those rare narcissistic, self-aware, mirror-gazing sorts of animals, it proves difficult to repress for very long the shamefully rich feeling we have for ourselves.

Read more●

‘Rigid things collapse. The rest can move, yes, it transforms, it may lose sections, but its spirit will remain.’

Frida Escobedo

Serpentine Pavilion 2018 & Aesop

An exploration of architecture and our surrounds

Please note that the continuing page will be displayed in English only.

Aesop’s literary digest, The Fabulist

Literature to complement a sense of space

Letter of Introduction

An Interview with Frida Escobedo

A Map of Marble, Steel, and Water

Ghirriland

Life Finds a Way

Red

Serpentine Pavilion 2018 & Aesop

An exploration of architecture and our surrounds

Please note that the continuing page will be displayed in English only.

Aesop’s literary digest, The Fabulist

Literature to complement a sense of space

Letter of Introduction

An Interview with Frida Escobedo

A Map of Marble, Steel, and Water

Ghirriland

Life Finds a Way

Red

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