Last chance to see - Jean Nouvel comes to London: the tenth year of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

For the tenth consecutive year, visitors to London’s Hyde Park this summer have had an extra landmark on their list of things to see. French architect Jean Nouvel is the latest in a line of distinguished international figures to have been invited to create a pavilion on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery for the duration of the summer.

His bold geometric design for the temporary structure includes retractable awnings and a freestanding 12 metre wall set at a gravity-defying angle – a comment on the idea of play and the French tradition of outdoor table tennis. The whole structure is a vivid red, designed to contrast with the green of its park setting, and to playfully reflect iconic British images such as telephone and post boxes and London buses. For the duration of its exhibition the pavilion will be used for talks and events as well as a series of special installations, including French artist Christian Boltanski’s Heartbeat, an archive of recordings of visitor’s heartbeats which will eventually be housed on the uninhabited isand of Ejima, Japan.

Ten years on from when the idea was first conceived by Gallery Director Julia Payton-Jones, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion still remains one of the most ambitious architectural programmes of its kind. The original premise for the scheme has changed little: international architects are invited to design a structure that will be on show for three months, the designs must be built a maximum of six months after the invitation and the architect must not have completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation.

As such the scheme is now a fully established international site for architectural experimentation, providing a challenging model for commissioning architecture as well as offering international architects the chance to showcase their work in Britain. Nouvel’s design joins an impressive list of structures by notable architects including Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Frank Gehry, Rom Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid - who famously reinvented the idea of the marquee in her capacity as the first architect to be commissioned by the Gallery for the programme.