by Roberta del Vaglio.
Sustainability and recovery without neglecting beauty and creativity: the future is a melting pot of different cultures, amazing but also linked to tradition, between craftsmanship and cutting-edge design.
Not a fair but a festival, a great celebration of design in all its forms, reflections, skills and provocations. This is how the London Design Festival expresses itself with a program that runs through the city until 22 September 2024, divided into neighbourhoods-districts, each with its own creative identity. An engaging review that focuses not so much on trends but rather on themes, from the most urgent ones such as sustainability and recovery to the more speculative ones such as enchantment and beauty.
One of the pillars of the festival is the Victoria Albert Museum which hosts a series of installations in its rooms to reflect on how design can give shape to private and public spaces but also to relationships between people and between people and space. For example, Craft x Tech is a project that investigates a possible coexistence between craftsmanship and digital culture, promoted by Hideki Yoshimoto of the Tangent studio and curated by Maria Cristina Didero. They invited six designers to come into contact with as many artisan districts in Japan to create a series of projects that try to break down the boundary between two worlds, that of the artisan and that of the product designer, which often imagine themselves divided and opposed.
Artifact by Ini Archibong for the Craft x Tech project.
Yokan by Sabine Marcelis for the Craft x Tech project.
Reframing luxury is a furnishing project by Modular by Mensah: designer Kusheda Mensah redefines the idea of leather as a luxury material by using production waste to create seats intended for public spaces and social interaction. The Victoria Albert Museum also asked three emerging talents to create a project on the theme of origins and among these, Angela Ford’s idea is particularly interesting, as she searched for the various countries of origin that merged into her DNA and then gave the shape of a vase to each of them.
Furthermore, in an investigation into the role of design in the manifestation of dissent, Nick Newman of Studio Bark, simultaneously with the release of his volume Protest Architecture, presented Barricade and beacon: an example of how architectural structures can be used to protest peacefully but effectively.
Reframing Luxury by Modular by Mensah.
The Angela Ford Origins Project.
Barricade and beacon by Studio Bark.
The festival also punctuates other and various prestigious venues in the city. The courtyard of the Chelsea College of Art hosts Vert, a project by the Diez studio in collaboration with OMC°C: it reflects on the increase in temperatures and the need to provide the city with more shaded areas and more oxygen. Vert is a prototype for a large trellis to which fast-growing climbing plants cling to create a cool space for shelter in summer.
At the same time, the sun is the protagonist at Somerset House, in the light installation The Sun, My Heart sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies by the Marjan van Aubel studio specialized in projects related to solar energy.
Vert by Studio Diez and OMC°C. Photo Ed Reeve.
The Sun, My Heart by studio Marjan van Aubel. Photo Ed Reeve.
Meanwhile, in central London, the Spanish designer Jaime Hayon has “taken over” the windows of the iconic and historic Fortnum Mason tea room which, on the occasion of the festival, host an excursus of his most significant projects and a special intervention by him graphic on the glass.
Speaking of glass, the installation of the whiskey brand Johnnie Walker is also interesting, as it has carried out a path of research and experimentation to make its glass bottles thinner and more sustainable: a path of trial and error in which the “wrong” bottles ” were recovered and transformed into a suggestive work of art and design called Liquid Light by the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective.
The works of Jaime Hayon in the windows of Fortnum Mason.
The Liquid Light installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast. Photo Mel Yates.
On the cover, the installation Together in Battersea, in the Battersea Power Station, curated by the POoR collective, winner of the Emerging Design Talent medal in the 2023 edition of the festival.
