London Design Festival highlights
THE 15th edition of the London Design Festival, running from Sept 16-24, offers a programme of over 400 events taking place in the city’s cultural institutions and indoor and outdoor spaces.
Art installations are a popular feature of the week-long festival, which is estimated to attract over 375,000 people from over 75 countries. Anticipated installations for 2017 include major pieces by Camille Walala, Ross Lovegrove and Elias and Yousef Anastas.
The Landmark Projects programme: showcasing exceptional art – Every year since 2007, the London Design Festival has commissioned some of the world’s most wellknown artists, as well as up-and-coming names, to create pieces inspired by different themes, locations or materials. Previous Landmark Projects include architect Zaha Hadid’s Urban Nebula (2007), David Adjaye’s Scelera (2008) and Paul Cocksedge’s Drop (2010).
For the 2017 Landmark Project, French graphic designer Camille Walala will exhibit her Villa Walala in the heart of London’s Broadgate district. A “soft-textured building-block castle”, the Villa Walala is a colourful construction made from vinyl, PVC and nylon, designed to create a “vast and immersive temporary island of shape and colour that begs to be explored, invites playfulness, relieves stress, and visually dominates the area.”
Please do touch: Ross Lovegrove’s Transmission – Unlike most pieces at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, especially those in the tapestry room, Welsh artist and industrial designer Ross Lovegrove’s Transmission installation is meant to be touched. Over 20m long, the undulating sculpture is described by the artist as the “three-dimensionalisation of the two-dimensional tapestries into a single, sculptural, tactile fold”.
Lovegrove worked with Alcantara materials (they’re composed of about 68% polyester and 32% polyurethane) to digitally recreate traditional embroidery, with the effect of aged dyes contrasting with gold and silver thread to catch the light.
While We Wait: a meditative installation with political overtones – Also at the V&A Museum, the Bethlehem-based Palestinian architect brothers Elias and Yousef Anastas will be exhibiting their immersive installation While We Wait, a self-supporting stone latticework structure that makes reference to the Cremisan Valley located in the disputed area between the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The 500 pieces of stone used in the installation come from different regions of Palestine, and were cut into shape using robots before being handfinished by local craftsmen.