London Design Festival 2014

From big institutions, such as V&A and Design Museum, to galleries and showrooms, Aram, Mint, 19 Greek Street and Molteni&C: we selected some of the best projects at this year’s Design Festival.

London Design Festival (13–21 September 2014) is a real marathon. The metropolis is huge and, when time is at a premium, it is frustrating when you fail to stick to your agenda, however carefully planned before you left home.

Opening and above: Diana Simpson, Glass Lab

The big institutions are an absolute must: the V&A is presenting “Double Space”, a masterfully successful show of muscle by Barber&Osgerby based on collaboration with BMW. The designer duo explores movement in the Raphael Gallery with a huge installation in slow and perpetual movement in the form of two independently revolving panels that reflect and distort the incredible pictures on the walls, offering a stunning new take on the permanent collection via unusual spatial perception. Across the city, the London Design Museum presents the seventh Designers in Residence, curated this year by the excellent Australian Pollyanna Clayton-Stamm and entitled “Disruption”.

Four young designers – James Christian, Ilona Gaynor, Torsten Sherwood and Patrick Stevenson-Keating – were invited to respond to the brief and their projects are divided into paradigmatic sections (Disrupting Housing, Disrupting the Law, Disrupting Finance, Disrupting Play). They feature historic exploration by Christian – showcased with great illustrational skill and freshness in 3D-printed models – into vernacular architecture and self-managed life in the pre-Victorian slums, including London Bridge which was home to shops, housing and a chapel; Gaynor’s sophisticated and ironic multimedia research (she boasts past experience working alongside Ridley Scott) into the methodology of the legal world, comparing the courts and their dynamics to a TV studio, where lawyers like actors adhere to a set script; Stevenson-Keating’s playful form but solid concepts address the delicate (and to many abstract) subject of finance – and more pragmatically that of cash; we all know that money travels fast but are unaware of the dynamics and algorithms.

Designers in Residence. Photo Luke Hayes

In his Reciprociti Bank, visitors insert their credit cards into a mysterious ATM where data on the last transactions are processed and the display shows where the money spent ends up. It is, of course, a purely speculative operation and nothing is real, just like the souvenir-banknote returned to you at the end of the operation. The fourth project, by Sherwood, is a real product, a sort of cardboard Lego with which modular architecture can be built in endless combinations – popular with young visitors but designed for all.

19 Greek Street is a Soho gallery that always has a refined and unexpected offer, captained by Marc Péridis under the artistic direction of Camilla Ginevra Bò. On the top floor of the gallery, Glass Lab is a project that recycles glass bottles in loco; collected and smashed to pieces, they are recycled by the designer Diana Simpson (MA RCA Design Products) who creates geometric tesserae in different colours.

At the Aram Gallery, a renowned location devoted to experimentation in the heart of Covent Garden, an exhibition entitled “Future Stars?” by Héloïse Parke presents a selection of products by young international designers, including The Little Black Armchair for outdoors by young Polish creative Maria Jeglinska, who manages to twist a single piece of wire into a chair – a turquoise version is on display. For “Gio Ponti: Una Storia da Copertina”, Molteni&C invited the magazine Port and four British fabric designers to interpret Ponti’s D.270.1 and D.270.2 folding chair – also in an armchair version. Custhom (Nathan Philpott and Jemma Ooi), Richard and Esme Winter, Fion Griffith and Marwood (Becky French) worked to produce an edition in up-to-date patterns that bring a new touch to the great master’s design.

Mint is a research showroom a stone’s throw from the V&A that displays several specialist brands with an international outlook as well as the “Elements of Craft” exhibition: the BonBon Side stool is made of several layers of graded polyethylene in old-fashioned sweet colours. The festival’s events could not but include a project on designer gastronomy and this can be found in the historic neighbourhood of St James, in the Georgian house that is the Hay showroom, filled for the occasion with geometric fabrics (interiors by Keays & Kempton). English designer Sebastian Wrong believes that visiting a showroom should be an original and holistic experience (which the food can only add to) so, for wrongforhay, he organised a pop-up restaurant called Design and Dine serving a delicious dinner created by Finnish chef Antto Melasniemi (former keyboard-player for heavy-metal band HIM), promoter of the Solar Kitchen – i.e. cooking with solar energy alone. Diners awaiting their food are distracted by the Danish brand’s products: scattered here and there are brightly coloured tablecloths by Nathalie Du Pasquier and cutlery, carafes and glasses from the catalogue: all the “good things in life”.

side-table and stool Bon Bon, Mint Gallery

Finally, Richard Woods presents his latest book Country Life, published by Albion. All the covers are different and it focuses on outdoor living, featuring his distinctive contrasting colours added to photographs of animals in the countryside, plants, portraits of friends and illustrations of products and architecture.

London Design Festival 2014

From big institutions, such as V&A and Design Museum, to galleries and showrooms, Aram, Mint, 19 Greek Street and Molteni&C: we selected some of the best projects at this year’s Design Festival.

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