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This year's London Design Festival proved it's not always gray in London

#LDF2017

This year's London Design Festival proved it's not always gray in London

Bright colors, bold stripes, and geometric shapes were found in abundance during London Design Festival (LDF), which closed on September 24.

Stealing the show were London designers Camille Walala and Adam Nathaniel Furman. The former’s Villa Walala inflatable castle comprised a series of basic shapes doused with playful colors to match. Walala’s installation, which is in keeping with her previous work, couldn’t be more out of place. Situated in Broadgate’s Exchange Square by Liverpool Street, Villa Walala spruced up an area typically awash with navy-suited bankers on smart phones. The castle was perhaps much needed.

The splash of color continued on to the West. At the Barbican, Morag Myerscough and Luke Morgan designed Joy. Spanning the Barbican’s concrete wall along Silk Street were six symbols: a heart represented love, a globe represented society, a sun represented joy, an eye represented London’s openness, a star represented energy, and finally, a flower represented peace.

The same symbols could also be found at the designers’ Peace Garden and Pavilion in the West Smithfield Rotunda Garden. This piece, which was more accomplished, played with perspective and also provided shelter to visitors courtesy of drapes partially spanning the circular walkway, supported by zig-zagging columns.

More of Myerscough’s work could be found south of the river, too, though this was not part of the LDF. Emblazoned onto Grosvenor Arch, the entrance to Battersea’s Circus West Village (an area primed for vapid commercialization and luxury condos), is the word “POWER.” Just as blindingly colorful as the Peace Garden and Pavilion, the piece – known as Power Circus – makes use of marine plywood panels that were hand-painted by Myserscough and her team of artists.

If this aesthetic was to your taste, then one could head even further west to White City. Here, New York and London-based designers Craig Redman and Karl Maier transformed a former gas station. Titled HereAfter, the colorful installation was not part of the LDF but is open to the public indefinitely. HereAfter can be found on 74 Wood Lane.

It should be no surprise that with such vibrant hues being plastered all over the capital, Adam Nathaniel Furman got in on the act. Another star installation which had Instagrammers flocking to it was Gateways. Commissioned by Turkishceramics, Furman designed four 13-foot-by-13-foot tiled gates that referenced the history of ceramics in Turkish. The gates had different shaped passageways through them and were flanked on either side by shallow water that reflected the colorful tiles.

“There is no other architectural treatment that has remained as fresh, relevant and cool as ceramics has from a thousand years BC, right through into the 21st century,” said Furman.

His work, which was located at Granary Square by Kings Cross Station, fronted the Central Saint Martins art school where DesignJunction—a three-day design fair run in tandem with the LDF—was hosted in and around. Here, work from numerous exhibitors could be found, notably Turner Prize-winning architecture studio Assemble. The group showcased work from their Granby workshop in Liverpool which produced fixtures and fittings for the Granby Four Streets project which won the 2015 Turner Prize. Now in its second year, the workshop is expanding to produce tableware known as “SPLATWARE.”

Also on show at the LDF was work from British architecture firm Sam Jacob Studio. Presented in collaboration with car manufacturer MINI, Urban Cabin was a mock micro-house situated in Blackfriars where Londoners could come and swap books. On one side of the cabin, Jacob installed classically-inflected entablature crafted with a range of materials including foam board, MDF and various types of other timber and chipboard. Among a hammock and other furnishings, Urban Cabin came pre-stocked with architecture, design and London-centric books for people to take and replace – on the condition that they left a personal note about the book.

The festival continued at Somerset House. The most popular piece here was PriestmanGoode’s exhibition of interior design strategies for a hyperloop system. Here, visitors could also sit on prototype seat and feel test finishes and surfaces, look at color palettes and provide suggestions for what they wanted inside hyperloop cars.

LDF spread to Greater London, too. In Bexley, East London, Erith Lighthouse was erected for the festival. The polycarbonate lighthouse, designed by architects DK-CM and design studio The Decorators, was erected along the Thames Estuary’s edge and hosted a series of food-based events. 

Sticking to light as a medium, the Victoria & Albert Museum showcased the Reflection Room as part of the festival. Created by Flynn Talbot, the exhibition used 56 custom-made stretch membrane Barrisol panels to reflect orange and blue light which emanated from Tryka LED profiles installed at each end of an enclosed corridor .

Want more? Find the full list of projects and events that were found at LDF this year here. Missed it? Maybe next year! The 2018 London Design Biennial will run from September 4 through September 24.

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