This is Part 2 of Designersblock, and the last but surely not least of our London Design Festival coverage. Read Part 1 here, and make sure you haven’t missed a beat — read all of our LDF 2011 posts here.
Graphic Relief are doing incredible things with high precision moulding and concrete.
Designersblock was the highlight of London Design Festival for me, so given that this is my last series of posts covering LDF11 for Design Milk… I have saved the best for last. There was so much to share, so I’ve broken it up into Part 1 and Part 2.
The design, the curation and the space itself were inspirational and exciting; creating a real “festival” atmosphere. Not bad considering it was my third show on the eighth day of the festival. The space was the Farmiloe Building on St John Street, home to lead and glass merchants George Familoe & Sons until April 1999.
100% Design has been going since 1994, almost a decade longer than the wider London Design Festival, which launched in 2003. But it’s as contemporary as ever with exhibitors selected by a panel of design experts to ensure quality and relevance.
It’s primarily a trade show, but is open to the public on the last day. It’s a more mainstream event than the East London contingent, but offers a glimpse of the coming year’s trends and a chance to spot design stars of the future.
Here are my top trends for 2012…
This is Origin’s second year of being part of the London Design Festival rather than a stand-alone event, and its second year at Old Spitalfields Market.
It still has a slightly different feel to many of the events on offer, appealing to a slightly older crowd, and focusing exclusively on contemporary craft. It attracts some wonderfully quirky exhibitors – these Azurer pots (above) were so organic they almost seemed to be growing!
This is one of the London Design Festival events I wish I had been able to attend this year.
Outline Editions invited award-winning graphic artist Noma Bar to create an interactive exhibition and installation during LDF. For the event, appropriately named Cut It Out, he made an interactive art-making machine. The machine is basically a Heath Robinson-esque embossing device in which visitors will feed paper and other material that become cut-out Noma Bar artwork. The artwork will be signed and numbered by the artist as part of a limited edition series. Oh, did I mention the machine looks like the giant dog from one of Noma Bar’s prints?
Based in the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Tent London is the unofficial HQ for East London’s Design Festival. The antithesis of the V&A (the official LDF “hub”), this is often the place to spot emerging trends and new talent. Here are the best bits…
1. Penelope Jordan’s three-dimensional textile art draws you in for a closer look.
Now in its second year and supported by the Society for British Interior Design, Tramshed is a boutique selection of interior products in a pop-up style location. Here are the highlights…
Right by the entrance and getting things started on the right note were these wonderfully tactile ceramics from Karen Morgan. I love the juxtaposition between their soft pliable appearance and the actual nature of the material.
The London Transport Museum has collaborated with design company Squint, known for their lavish use of multiple rich, colorful fabrics on antique furniture to create a range of furniture using London Transport’s iconic moquette patterns, designed for use on tubes, trams and buses.
For the London Design Festival, award-winning architects Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A) and engineering firm Arup have simultaneously framed and opened up the Cromwell Road entrance to the V&A. The installation is incredibly successful; perhaps surprisingly so, given its simplicity.
What happens when you take ten designers based in London and you leave them for one week inside an empty factory in the Dutch countryside? This is what…
Having successfully carried out a similar project in 2005, Arco invited ten Okay Studio designers (a collective of RCA graduates) to experiment with their state-of-the-art machinery and see what they could come up with – this time based from the factory, and in just a week. They were challenged to make something from wood that was completely different from anything in the current Arco catalog.
