Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 Designed by Jean Nouvel© Ateliers Jean Nouvel Photo: Philippe Ruault

The Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park is having a slumber party right at the heels of their annual summer party, which took place around their 10^th and latest eye-catching Pavilion, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel.

Nouvel’s scarlet Pavilion set the scene for the darlings of the British art set attending. Ron Arad, Antony Gormley, Gavin Turk, Dinos Chapman,  Sir Peter Blake, Grace Jones, Tracey Emin and model Lily Cole were among the guests invited to play ping-pong and tennis with champion players and have their heartbeats recorded by French artist Christian Boltanski’s installation The Heart Archive. Also on view in the permanent galleries inside was the summer show of new inkjet prints by Wolfgang Tillmans.

July 8 2010 Summer Party at Serpentine Gallery, London, England. L to R: Dinos Chapman and Keith Tyson, Sir Peter Blake and Chrissie Blake, Tracey Emin. Photo: Nick Harvey

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 Designed by Jean Nouvel © Ateliers Jean Nouvel Photograph: Philippe Ruault

Julia Peyton-Jones, the director who had originally envisioned this fund-raising concept, hosted this 40^th anniversary party for the gallery with the new, much talked about co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. This year’s Pavilion is built on impressive cantilevered structures painted in vivid red, set in dramatic contrast to the green of the Hyde Park lawns. Nouvel said in his opening speech, “I want more disorder in this place,” imagining a relaxed place for people to play. The Pavilion is canopied by large retractable awnings and a sloping freestanding wall that allows the park to inhabit the interiors.

Notable architects that had been invited in previous years to design the free-form Pavilion include Daniel Libeskind (2001), Frank Gehry (2008), and Rem Koolhaas/Cecil Balmond (2006). The architect Zaha Hadid who had designed the 2000 Pavilion also came along for the celebration.

Spending the night in the park may not be as sordid as it sounds, because as part of the summer program, the gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum are staging a sleepover event inside the Pavilion, beginning late at night with films, music, talks and a midnight banquet that will continue on until breakfast is served the next day at 8am. Artists, psychologists and scientists will host experiments throughout the night for the wired, sleepless guests to explore the psychedelic qualities of insomnia and alternative sleep-states.

Guests might be treated to some lullabies as well.

Sleepover at the Serpentine Pavilion: A night of creative thinking: 30-31 July 2010 from 10pm – 8am
Wolfgang Tillmans 26 June – 19 September 2010, Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens   London W2

Antony Gormley, Amazonian Field, 1992, Terracotta, Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London

One way to combat the unusual winter cold in London, while griping about climate change, is to curl up under a handmade rug and a hot water thermos in the portico of the Royal Academy of Arts at 6 Burlington Gardens, where Sketch has opened a pop-up café to coincide with the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World funded by GSK Contemporary. Above me – while I nibble oysters and sip champagne, seated on recycled cardboard chairs -  is CO₂morrow, an LED-lit, virus-like installation clinging to the façade of the building, showing the fluctuating levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. The display (by Lutyens and Marianantoni) is fed by data from external monitoring systems, and inspired by the idea of a zeolite, a scrubber molecule that “scrubs” CO₂ from pollutants, which may be yet another engineered hope for our future.

Upstairs, the exhibition continues with a disjointed collection of environmentally related works by internationally renowned artists including Antony Gormley, Sophie Calle, Trace Emin and Gary Hume. One of the first discomfiting encounters is with Gormley’s Amazonian Field, where a vast room overflows with tiny terracotta figurines; a seething mass of humanity made of the earth itself, they stare back at us, confronting us with pleading eyes.

Tomas Saraceno, Endless Series, 2006 Framed c-print 33 x 50 cm Andersen’s Contemporary Berlin/Copenhagen

Another interesting project, by the artists Ackroyd & Harvey, is Beuys’ Acorns. Inspired by Joesph Beuys’ project of planting 7000 oak trees in 1982 for Documenta 7, the artists collected the acorns from the mature oaks and replanted and germinated them in the portico of the gallery, continuing the theme of urban pollination. In a different work, the same artists extract carbon from the ash of the cremated bone of a polar bear, which, through immense heat and pressure, is made to coalesce into a single diamond – making us ponder value and loss in the price we pay for carbon.

Mariele Neudecker, a Bristol based German artist, creates fragile landscapes and realities that exist in chemical solutions in glass tanks, inspired by 19^th century landscapes, and the two milky glass orbs, 400 Thousand Generations refers to the number of generations it takes for photosensitive tissue to evolve into the human eye.

Once outside, for a shortcut into Picadilly I wend my way past the boutiques in the Burlington Arcade; at a 190 years, it is the oldest British shopping arcade, and the exhibition continues here with Onward, a series of luminescent sculptures hung through the arcade in an allegory of molecular evolution. It is created by UVA, the British design firm that have also recently worked on Massive Attack’s United Snakes.

Ackroyd and Harvey and UVA are speaking at the Academy on January 22 2010. For more details see Royal Academy of Arts.