Moments from Serpentine North Gallery

Before it held art, this small brick building in Kensington Gardens was a gunpowder store, built in the early nineteenth century to keep the Royal Parks' munitions at a safe remove from the city, a fittingly volatile former life for a building that Zaha Hadid transformed in 2013 into one of London's more architecturally daring small galleries, formerly known as the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Hadid kept the original brick structure largely intact and wrapped a swelling, tented white extension around and behind it, a form that reads, depending on the angle and light, as either a captured wave or fabric caught mid-motion, in sharp contrast to the boxy historical brick it grows out of.

Because the building itself is such a strong architectural statement, it's worth walking entirely around the exterior before going in, the join between Hadid's fluid extension and the original rigid gunpowder store is more visible, and more interesting, from outside than from within the galleries themselves. It sits a short walk from Serpentine South across Kensington Gardens, and the two are worth visiting together, the contrast between the modest 1930s tea pavilion and Hadid's dramatic extension makes a genuinely useful case study in how differently two eras of architects have approached the same basic problem: putting art inside a small park building.