The London Serpentine Pavilion commission for 2024 will be designed by South Korean architect Minsuk Cho. Ahead of the exhibition’s June launch, the creator of Mass Studies unveiled early renders of their winning design this morning. Visitors would perceive his team’s arrival as a bustling center of activity resembling a star, alerting them to a range of communal areas they claim were the outcome of a close examination of their forebears.

Inspired by the traditional Madang courtyard elements prevalent in tiny residential buildings throughout Korea, a constellation of smaller structures will assemble around a central empty space for the 23rd overall edition of the Serpentine Pavilion. These five distinct zones will each have a name, a programmatic purpose, and a double role as “content machines.” They are designed to integrate with the matching open spaces and park that surround the pavilion.

“We began by asking what can be uncovered and added to the Serpentine site, which has already explored over 20 iterations at the center of the lawn, from a roster of great architects and artists,” Cho said when asked about his team’s approach to designing the 2024 commission. “To approach this new chapter differently, instead of viewing it as a carte blanche, we embraced the challenge of considering the many existing peripheral elements while exploring the center as a void. It also begins to address the history of the Serpentine Pavilion. By inverting the center as a void, we shift our architectural focus away from the built center of the past, facilitating new possibilities and narratives.”

Before going back to Korea to start Mass Studies in 2003, Cho worked for OMA and the company that was once known as Polshek and Partners (now Ennead) in New York. Subsequently, the project has garnered other distinguished accolades and recognitions, such as the esteemed Golden Lion Award for the most outstanding national pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. In the last several years, his company has finished renovations to the Osulloc Tea Museum on Jeju Island and an expansion project for the French embassy in Seoul. Cho is also one of the few Korean artists and architects to have been awarded the national government’s Hwagwan Medal Order of Cultural Merit.

“We are honored to present Minsuk Cho’s first structure on UK soil here at Serpentine as our next architecture Pavilion, opening this summer,” the Serpentine’s Chief Executive and Artistic Director, Bettina Korek and Hans Ulrich Obrist, said in a preview finally. “Titled Archipelagic Void, Cho’s Pavilion is modular by nature, composed of individual structures that serve specific functions, yet which also come together as a continuous unit.”

Following the food-inspired contribution of Lebanese-French architect Lina Ghotmeh, the 23rd pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens will be accessible to the public from June 7 to October 27.