The London Design Festival is an annual event that brings together designers, practitioners, retailers, and educators from across the globe. This year’s program of events, exhibitions, and installations invites creative leaders to exchange ideas and solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time, like climate change, pollution, and resource depletion. The festival includes the Landmarks Projects. As part of this initiative, Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis has created “Swivel”, an outdoor installation in central London. Other installations like Sony Design’s “Into Sight” pavilion or Sou Fujimoto’s “Medusa” exhibition explore visual and sensorial effects through physical and virtual mediums.
Commissioned on the occasion of the London Design Festival’s 20th anniversary, “Swivel” aims to bring color and interactivity to St. Giles Square, a plaza near Tottenham Court Road. The area is generally perceived as a place of transition, connecting multiple public transportation routes. Marcelis’ installation creates a playground of seating that invites pedestrians to pause their journey. Through unexpected hues and patterns, Swivel will brighten up this area and offer a juxtaposing natural material to a square that is surrounded by many man-made structures. The ten unique seats are crafted from a selection of travertines, quartzites, and marbles sourced from Europe, the Middle East, and Brazil.
This project, as with most of my work, is a celebration of materials. I wanted to respond to the space by injecting a bit of colour and fun into this urban environment. Deliberately choosing a natural material in a range of colours, I wanted to create a strong contrast with the surrounding architecture and the man-made material palette. Being an interactive piece, it welcomes audiences to decide how they would like to experience the space. It could encourage strangers to interact with each other, for friends to sit together or even allow people to create a moment of pause for themselves. - Sabine Marcelis
Further exploring the theme of materials and sensorial effects, “Into Sight” is a life-sized media platform installation by Sony Design. The pavilion transforms boundary surfaces into a perspective that overlaps shifting colors, lights and sounds. By going through the installation, visitors are expected to become more aware of the visual and audio dimensions that continuously change through the audience’s interaction. Other exhibitions, like “Awakening” by designer Gary James McQueen and photographer Simon Emmett, move even more into the virtual world. The installation is a digital fashion show that hopes to create a more sustainable way to experience fashion.
Last year, as part of the Landmarks Project, Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto collaborated with technology developer Tin Drum to create “Medusa”. The installation blends the physical and virtual worlds into spaces where tangible and intangible objects interact. To experience the installation, visitors wear headsets that are ‘optical pass-through,’ meaning that the glasses are transparent and do not block your view of the real world. The project is an exploration of the relationship between architecture and nature, bringing to life features that morph and evolve based on the movement of audiences in the space.
