CULTURE

The Best of the London Design Festival 2016

From a soaring clock to a tiny hall of lights, the 10 design installations that caught our eye in London.

by Pilar Viladas

Lee Broom Opticality for LDF 2016 photo credit Luke Hayes 5.jpg

1

Ed Reeve

“Mezzing in Lebanon,” designed by Annabel Karim Kassar as that country’s entry in the first London Design Biennale, won first prize for its evocation of a Beirut street market, complete with food stalls, a small cinema, and even a barber shop.

2

Ed Reeve

“The Green Room,” an installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum by the London studio Glithero, riffs on the idea of time (it was sponsored by the watchmaker Panerai) with a six story-high, rotating cylindrical curtain of multicolored silicone cords that rise and fall as they make one revolution per minute.

3

Workshop for Potential Design

In “ABC. . .,” an exhibition in the Brompton Design District, the editor Oli Stratford comments (left) on Study O Portable’s “DIffuse Screen” (right), part of “XYZ. . .,” an exhibition at Etage Projects in Copenhagen. Both exhibitions were organized by the Workshop for Potential Design.

4

Jess Tully

Martyn Thompson’s “Rock Pool,” designed with Charlotte Lawton, features Thompson’s latest textile designs, based on his photographs of the Ionian Sea, in an installation that was a Victorian-tinged collage of furniture, plants, and sculpture.

5

Pilar Viladas

“The world’s smallest sauna,” by Marcis Zieman, was part of “Soak, Steam, Dream: Reinventing Bathing Culture,” an exhibition at the Roca Gallery curated by Jane Withers that examines the history of communal bathing and presents bathhouses designed by contemporary architects.

6

Damian Griffiths

“No Ordinary Love,” an exhibition at the gallery SEEDS, was curated by Martino Gamper, and includes ceramics by a collective of thirteen designers, including Tiago Almeida, Lars Frideen, Gemma Holt, Jochen Holz, Max Lamb, and Bethan Wood — all of whom are friends, but who have never collaborated in this way.

7

Deniz Guzel, courtesy Galerie Kreo.

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby’s limited-edition Hakone table for Galerie Kreo is a monumental, nearly 10 foot-long dining table made of solid oak from a 400 year-old-tree. The designers intended it to be a table for family meals, noting that the wear and tear of everyday use will only increase its beauty.

8

Courtesy JamesPlumb

JamesPlumb’s “Reading Steps” is their re-do of a 19th century staircase; the designers added an upholstered seat at the top, to create a place for reading or contemplation. Hannah Plumb and James Russell are known for their lyrical re-fashioning of antique objects with a contemporary spin.

9

Luke Hayes

Lee Broom’s hall-of-mirrors installation “Opticality” was a clever showcase for his Op Art-inspired Oprical lights, which were introduced during Milan’s design week earlier this year, in a mobile showroom made from a van.

10

Courtesy Studio Swine

“Fordlandia,” Studio Swine’s exhibition on Henry Ford’s rubber processing plant and company town in the Brazilian rainforest — a failed venture that was abandoned in the 1940’s — reimagines the place as a model of collaboration and sustainability, and includes the designers’ own creations, like this chair made from ebonite, a hard rubber.