Monday, October 10, 2016

London Design Festival 2016 – V & A

 
London Design Festival 2016 – V & A. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design, was the official hub for the 2016 London Design Festival.  The dynamic programme featured major commissioned creative installations, talks, workshops and performances.
Above. Ben Evans director of the London Design Festival and Victoria Broackes curator of LDF for the V & A


V & A  - Liquid Marble – Mathieu Lehanneur
Embracing the sculptural form and textural qualities of marble, French multi-disciplinary designer Mathieu Lehanneur presented Liquid Marble. This installation is part of a series by Leheanneur which explores the materiality of marble. Using one vast slab of hand-polished black marble, Lehanneur sculpted a surreal vision of the sea, mimicking the look and feel of rippling water in in the historic interior of the Norfolk House Music Room. The structure reflects and distorts itself, and the intense color of the marble conjures up the depth of the ocean as if fossilized in stone.


 

V & A – The Green Room – Glithero
In a six storey stairwell in the West Wing of the Museum, British-based design-duo Glithero presented The Green Room, a kinetic installation centred around the passage of time. Designed in collaboration with the Italian luxury watch maker Panerai, this dramatic and complex installation, which could be viewed from multiple angles and levels explored the concept of time through the careful arrangement of layers and lengths of silicone cord. 

 
Glithero - Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren



The V & A Engineering Season  - Elytra Filament Pavilion
A newly-commissioned installation by experimental architect Achim Menges with Moritz Dorstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer, is situated in the Museum’s John Madejski Garden, until November 6. Their first ever public commission in the UK, Elytra Filament Pavilion explores the impact of emerging robotic technologies on architectural design, engineering and making. Inspired by a lightweight construction principle found in nature, the fibrous structures of the forewing shells of flying beetles known as elytra, the Pavilion is an undulating canopy of tightly-woven carbon fibre cells created using a novel robotic production process.

 
Dylan Wood, Aikaterini Papadimitriou and Mortiz Dorstelmann

 
V & A – Current Table – Caventou
Current Table is an intelligent living object that uses the property of color to convert light into energy.  Like plant photosynthesis, it reads light levels and harvests energy. Caventou designed by Marjan van Aubel uses solar technology to make everyday objects independent power sources.

 
Marjan van Aubel

 
V & A – Silk Leaf – Julian Melchiorri
Developed by the V & A’s Exhibition Road Engineering Resident Julian Melchiorri, Silk Leaf is the first man-made biological leaf prototype which harnesses natural photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen using only water and light. Photosynthesising materials, such as Silk Leaf, can be used applications in interior design and urban developments where carbon dioxide levels are high and breathable oxygen is needed.

 
Julian Melchiorri

 
  V & A – Foil – Benjamin Hubert
British design entrepreneur Benjamin Hubert, of experience design agency Layer, collaborated with iconic German brand Braun to create Foil.  The installation comprised of 50,000 mirror-finish stainless steel panels on a 20-metre by 1.2-meter undulating ribbon that ran down the lenght of one of the tapestry galleries.  Light from LEDs reflected off the panelled surface to create slowly morphing and evocative patterns of scattered light, moving across the walls and cielings.  The installation was accompied by an atmospheric soundscape that emanulated the fluid motion of the sculpture and reflected light.  The shape of the metallic elements was informed by the precision engineered shape of Braun shaver foil and the movement was inspired by the 360-degree movement of the Braun shaver head.
 

Benjamin Hubert


 



V & A – Beloved - Tabanlıoglu Architects
Istanbul-based architecture firm Tabanlıoglu Architects reinterpreted Sabahattin Ali’s classic 1943 novel Madonna in a Fur Coat through an evocative, multi-sensory installation on a bridged gallery over the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. 
“Madonna in a Fur Coat is one of the greatest novels in Turkish literature. We wanted to introduce the book to a new audience in London, as the book has recently been published in English translation for the first time in its 73-year history.” 
Murat Tabanlıoglu
Titled Beloved, the installation took the form of a 13-metre-long mirrored black box, with cracks in the surface through which visitors could peer through. Within, atmospheric scenes from the novel were re-created using cinematic techniques, physical objects, text, light and sound. Tabanlıoglu Architects chose to locate the installation on the bridge, a metaphor for the themes of the novel which deals with the relationship between a young Turkish man and an enigmatic German woman, and is set between interwar period in two cities: Berlin and Ankara.


 
  Sabahattin Ali - Madonna in a Fur Coat - covers

 
Breakfast at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Sculpture in Britain Galleries 1600-1900

 
V & A – London Souvenirs
The London Design Festival and the V & A collaborated with leading London-based designers to create a collection of contemporary, design-led souvenirs celebrating the capital.
Above. Graphic agency Pentagram designed a set of beermats and a bone china mug featuring playful phrases from the almost lost language of cockney rhyming slang. Pentagram Partner Domenic Lippa has always liked rhyming slang ever since his father brought home a slang phrase book - for him it represents a quintessential part of London.


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