Architecture News

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014

By Chris Foges

Held this year from September 13 to September 21, the festival has grown to become one of the city’s calendar events, visited by an estimated 350,000 people.<br /> — Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Held this year from September 13 to September 21, the festival has grown to become one of the city’s calendar events, visited by an estimated 350,000 people.
Photo © Susan Smart

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Tincan, an ongoing Soho pop-up restaurant conceived and operated by architect AL_A, offers a menu comprising 25 varieties of canned seafood, from humble sardines to $35 scallops. The colorful packaging also forms the window display and décor, glittering jewel-like against black Corian walls. Custom-made stackable aluminum chairs and shallow pendant lights incorporating wafer-thin OLED panels complete the interior.
Photo courtesy Tincan

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
The Wish List, on show at the V&A, had a simple but intriguing concept: 10 established designers commission objects that they have always wanted from emerging talents. The products, all fabricated from American hardwoods, included Gareth Neal’s CNC-cut white oak carafe for Zaha Hadid, a combined ladder and reading seat by Xenia Mosely for Richard Rogers, and—humblest of all—Norie Matsumoto’s spherical, pyramidal, and cube-shaped pencil sharpeners designed to accommodate each of the three grades of pencil favored by Norman Foster.
Photo © Petr Krejci

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
In the V&A’s Raphael Gallery, a pair of aluminum-clad blades, measuring 100 by 30 feet, rotated slowly overhead, their mirrored surfaces reflecting the wall-hung, 16th-century 'cartoons' originally painted for the Sistine chapel. Each blade had flat and convex faces. As they revolved—either in parallel or independently— straight reflections alternated with distorted, wide-angle views. “We wanted to change how you perceive the cartoons,” says designer Jay Osgerby of Barber & Osgerby. “The point is to come in here and have an experience – to see things in a different way.”
Photo courtesy Barber & Osgerby

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Spanning the ornamental pond in the V&A’s central courtyard, *Crest* is the world’s thinnest shell structure, says Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. It comprised two layers of quarter-inch aluminum plate, overlapped and bolted to form an asymmetric arc held in tension, and is in fact a fragment of a larger piece: a canopy for a Dubai hotel.
Photo © Ed Reeve

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Squire & Partners’ lustrous installation for Brooks Brothers—one of 15 temporary window displays by architects for Regent Street retailers—referenced the Golden Fleece, a historical symbol of wool merchants and Brooks Brothers’ trademark. Two sheep-shaped chandeliers are formed from over 800 handmade sheep figures, covered in gold-leaf and suspended on golden threads. They were hung face-to-face, one against a gold leaf backdrop, and the other against blue pinstripe. A trail of chalk hoof prints led from two store entrances to a life-size cast bronze sheep grazing on the sidewalk.
Photo © James Jones

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
WikiHouse, a nonprofit project led by London-based Architecture 00, is an open-source construction set—an online library of adaptable components that allow anyone to design, download, and CNC-print economical plywood structures. Installed in central London, the prototype structure exemplifies a growing interest among designers in how emerging technologies will change our understanding of authorship and the ownership of ideas.
Photo courtesy Architecture 00

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Created by graphic designer Michael Montgomery, product designer Felix de Pass, and ceramicist Ian McIntyre, the hypnotic Candela cleverly responded to the requirements of its site, a V&A tapestry gallery where light levels are low, and the need to reference its sponsor, a watch-maker. Concealed LEDs beamed pre-programmed patterns of light onto a large rotating disc, activating a phosphorescent material on its face that retained a fading impression for the duration of a revolution before being overwritten.
Photo © Susan Smart

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
East London’s Gallery FUMI exhibited light fixtures created using traditional Venetian hand-craft techniques by celebrated young glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert.
Photo © Susan Smart

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Contemporary handmade chandeliers by Canadian studio Bocci were on display at the Mayfair premises of traditional antiques dealer Mallett.
Photo courtesy Bocci

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Room-share behemoth Airbnb asked four designers—Jasper Morrison, Studioilse, Patternity, and Raw-Edges—to examine what makes a space into a home by customizing simple pitched-roofed pavilions in Trafalgar Square. Studioilse’s response was typically oblique, turning the question back on visitors and projecting their Tweeted replies on the walls.
Photo courtesy Airbnb

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Students from the Italian design school Fabrica were among the festival’s growing international contingent. Extra-Ordinary Gallery shown at east London’s Ace Hotel is a collection of everyday items, such as such as wire-frame flower vases and marble dumbbells, that are made special (though perhaps less practical) through close attention to detail and material.
Photo © Peter Guenzel

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
At the Designjunction showcase, Wallpaper magazine showed a project by AfghanMade Carpets, a U.S.-backed organization established to bolster the country’s weaving industry, in which contemporary patterns by European and American designers have been woven using traditional techniques.
Photo courtesy Wallpaper

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
Ceramicist Michael Eden’s 3D-printed nylon vessels appeared in an exhibition titled Future Heritage within the Decorex interiors fair. Its curator, Corinne Julius, brought together the work of 21 pioneering craftspeople with the intention of encouraging visitors to commission innovative, one-off products themselves.
Photo courtesy Decorex

Standouts: London Design Festival 2014
A dynamic installation by Simon Heijdens launched the NOW Gallery, a new south London venue. The pavilion’s 23-feet-high curving glass walls are wrapped in a skin of 1,920 triangular cells that switch instantaneously from a translucent to an opaque state in response to changes in daylight and the strength of the wind, creating a kaleidoscopic play of light and shadow on the floor.
Photo © Charles Emerton

Held this year from September 13 to September 21, the festival has grown to become one of the city’s calendar events, visited by an estimated 350,000 people.

In over 12 years the London Design Festival, held this year from September 13 to September 21, has grown to become one of the city’s calendar events, visited by an estimated 350,000 people and acting as an umbrella for projects by over 250 collaborators, from retailers and manufacturers to galleries and colleges.

Its hub was the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), where many of the Festival’s commissioned pieces are temporarily installed. Here, explains Festival director Ben Evans, “We try to say something different about design.” With no requirement to make objects that were saleable or conventionally functional, designers were free to focus on ideas.

Other centers of gravity were the independent design fairs and showcases that took place during the same week: 100% Design, Decorex, Designjunction, Tent London, and others. Smaller fry included multifarious pop-ups, take-overs, and make-overs, open studios and workshops, high-minded seminars, and innumerable launches and lunches. Among a profusion of great work—some of which is still on view—the following projects stood out. Click on the photo above to view a slide show.

Chris Foges is a writer and editor working in architecture and the built environment, based in London. He is contributing editor at the RIBA Journal and was formerly editor of Architecture Today magazine. His books include Imagination and The City Works.