Serpentine Gallery: 24-hour Interview Marathon: London

Every year the Serpentine Gallery, located in the heart of Hyde Park in central London, invites an internationally renowned architect or designer to design a temporary pavilion in their grounds for the summer. In 2006, a 24-Hour Interview Marathon event took place in the Pavilion designed by architect Rem Koolhaas. It featured over 60 world-renowned artists, architects, writers, designers and theorists, among them David Adjaye, Damien Hirst, Gilbert and George, Hussein Chalayan and Doris Lessing, as well as the Director of the Serpentine Gallery, Julia Peyton-Jones. The interviews were hosted by the architect of the Pavilion, Rem Koolhaas, and the Serpentine Gallery s Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Small and with a soft-cover in the format of a traditional flip-book , the book is a lively representation of the now legendary 24-hour marathon of interviews, held with some of the greatest names in international contemporary culture. A highly visual and energetic book for its small size, it features over 150 colour and black and white illustrations and photographs interspersed with text extracts from the interviews, and moves along in chronological order of the 24 hours. Koolhaas is one of the latest additions to an illustrious list of architects which include Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001),Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura with Cecil Balmond(2005), and Olafur Eliasson (2007).