Record your heartbeat at this year's Serpentine pavilion

(Ateliers Jean Nouvel)

Not one but two anniversaries are on the Serpentine Gallery's agenda this year: 40 years in existence and ten years of its popular summer pavilions, this year combining the works of two Frenchmen: architect Jean Nouvel and heartbeat archivist Christian Boltanski.

In what will be Nouvel's first completed building in the UK, the new pavilion is designed to be a contrast of metal structures and lightweight materials in a bright red, inspired by London's post boxes, buses, and telephone boxes.

Serving as a public space on the gallery's lawn, it will host a café and Serpentine's Park Nights, a talk and events series that attracts up to 250,000 visitors every summer. Installations will include the 5th Serpentine Gallery Marathon, which will again see artists present maps that are relevant to them, as well as Heartbeat by the French artist Christian Boltanski, a project that lets visitors record their heartbeat to be housed as part of an archive on the uninhabited island of Ejima, Japan.

Jean Nouvel has previously designed buildings all over the world, including the Copenhagen Concert Hall, the Ferrari Factory in Modena, and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery will be up from July 5 to October 20.

Each year, the gallery's project gives one designer six months to create an exhibition-housing pavilion, making the resulting buildings by the likes of Daniel Libeskind, Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Rem Koolhaas some of their most immediate works.

http://www.serpentinegallery.org