London Design Festival – Day 2

DAY 2: Brompton Design District, 100% Design

We began day two at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), now in it’s 5th year as the London Design Festival’s central hub.

Our guides whisked us through the various exhibits hardly giving us much time to stop and take in the exhibits much less capture a good photograph.

In partnership with Swarovski, the London Design Festival commissioned 14 designers to each find a tiny detail within the V&A and highlight it using a Swarovski lens. The project, entitled God is in the Details, takes the famous phrase coined by legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a starting point to encourage the visitor to discover design features that may have otherwise been overlooked.

Canadian Designer Omer Arbel created the 28.280 installation, suspending 280 individual Bocci 28 series handblown glass lights from the museum’s cupola to create a giant chandelier. The installation plunges almost 100 feet from the ceiling and through a hole in the floor before emerging in the atrium of the gallery.

“28 Series is an exploration of a fabrication process which is part of our quest for specificity.
Instead of designing form itself, here the intent was to design a system that haphazardly
yields form, almost as a byproduct. ‘28’ pendants result from a complex glass blowing
technique whereby air pressure is intermittently introduced into and then removed from a
glass matrix which is intermittently heated and then rapidly cooled.

The result is a distorted spherical shape with a composed collection of inner shapes, one of 
which is made of opaque milk glass and houses a light source.”

Other notable exhibits included V&A Designer in residence Julia Lohmann‘s installation of a huge sculpture made of seaweed, a white noise voice remixer created by Yuri Suzuki, a walk-through exhibit of 5,000 paper windmills created by Najla El Zein called The Wind Portal and The Dinner Party still life set up by Scholten and Baijings where visitors look upon a dinner scene and hear music playing softly in the background created by the objects before them by composers Moritz Gabe and Henning Grambow.

Perhaps the most breathtaking exhibit at the V&A is the Pearls exhibit running through January 19th in collaboration with the Qatar Museums Authority.

This lavish display explores the history of pearls from the early Roman Empire through to the present day and showcases some of the most exquisite pearl jewelery including the famous Mikimoto pearl necklace worn by Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor’s Bulgari pearl-drop pendant earrings.

To be Continued…Brompton Design District on BlogTourLondon