A greenhouse built to be dismantled is the most honest design decision in The Veggery, the temporary pavilion that closes this year’s London Festival of Architecture inside the Barbican Estate. Designed by Studio Folk Architects with design-and-build studio Raskl, the project was selected through the open Seeds in the City competition and installed to mark the end of LFA’s programming, powered by NLA. Part garden folly, part working allotment shed, it borrows its host building’s silhouette while doing none of its permanent work.
The form itself commits fully to the bit: a hexagonal, domed greenhouse with a vaulted polytunnel roof, water butts standing in for structural columns, and a metre-tall turnip finial (3.3 ft) crowning the apex. The reference isn’t subtle — the barrel-vaulted roofscape of the Barbican reappears here at garden-shed scale, English landscape tradition and Brutalist megastructure collapsed into one small building.
Windows carry the project’s most collaborative gesture: a pseudo-stained-glass treatment built from patterns transferred off giant paper collages, produced during workshops with students from the neighbouring City of London School for Girls. The timber frames are demountable and deliberately low-tech, built for rapid assembly and, just as importantly, for taking apart again.
Inside, the brief splits three ways. Three bays of flexible shelving hold plants and potting benches, while an open bay is left free for events — greenhouse, growing space and community pavilion occupying the same footprint. The planting was grown and propagated with the school, local residents, and community groups including the Barbican Horticultural Society, which does the actual work of making “community-led” mean something beyond a press line.
Patrick O’Keeffe, co-founder of Studio Folk Architects, frames the pavilion’s job as functional rather than decorative: “It’s a space that does a lot – a greenhouse, an event space, a classroom and a spot for lunch – so we hope everyone can find something they enjoy in it.”
Dan Rose, director of Raskl, points to sequencing as the real design problem the team solved — not form, but delivery. “Projects like this only succeed when design and delivery are worked through together from the start,” he said, citing the site’s layered use — a working church, a school with its own growing programme, a community that outlasts the festival.
Behind the pavilion sits the Culture Mile Business Improvement District, which commissioned it as one entry in a longer campaign: over its first five-year term, the BID plans to put up to £11 million into public realm and climate-resilience projects across the area. The Veggery is small relative to that ambition, but it’s the version residents can walk into.
The programme runs past the festival’s own calendar. The Veggery stays on display at the Barbican Estate until September 2026, with a final communal meal planned for the end of the summer, cooked from vegetables grown inside the structure over the season — a built-in expiry date that most architecture doesn’t get.
The real design decision isn’t the turnip finial or the Barbican echo — both photograph well and neither does much work. It’s the choice to treat disassembly as a requirement from day one, which is a harder and less visible commitment than borrowing a silhouette, and the one the rest of the project’s community claims actually depend on.
The Veggery by Studio Folk Architects and Raskl | Where: Barbican Estate, London | When: On display through September 2026