A timber framework for climbing plants designed by Diez Office and OMCºC erected at Chelsea College of Arts (image: Petr Krejci).

London Design Festival (LDF) 2024 took place from 14 to 22 September, and the Disegno team scurried all over the city to see the exhibitions, launches and projects on offer.

Our round up of the week includes foraging food, making hooks, seeing the parallels between Schrödinger's Cat and a walnut egg cup, and much more.

Image: The Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society.

Shades of Sōri

A display of work by Sōri Yanagi (1915-2011), the 20th-century master industrial designer, was always going to go down well with a design crowd: although Sōri’s work has not always received the attention it deserves from the European design press and institutions, he is something of a designer’s designer, with his objects (and particularly his tableware) widely admired for their beauty and utility. A selection of Sōri's designs are now on display at tokyobike as part of the design festival – from his stainless steel kettle to his iconic Elephant stool – which would amount to an enjoyable exhibition in itself, but the real star of the show is The Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society, a new book by designer Michael Marriott and writer Duncan Riches that is also on display. The book is a beautifully curated compendium of memories and reflections on Sōri and his work, submitted to the publication by an assortment of designers, critics and writers for whom Sōri’s practice has proven meaningful. From the admiring (Edwin Heathcote’s elegant reflection on the beauty of a cake slice) to the nostalgic (Lubna Chowdhary’s memory of encountering forks in Tanzania for the first time), with plenty of wit and warmth in between (Carl Clerkin’s anecdote about Sōri succesfully panel beating the side of a taxi he had just rammed in his own car is a particular delight), the stories in Marriott and Riches’ Appreciation Society run the full gamut of human emotion, cleverly knitted together to create a patchwork of tributes to a great designer. Sōri may not always have received the attention he deserved in Europe, but The Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society is a fine way to start correcting this.

The Sori Yanagi Appreciation Society: tokyobike London, 87-89 Tabernacle St, EC2A 4BA

Research made manifest

Any LDF is likely to bring its fair share of spectacle – large-scale public installations that impress with their sheer scale, ambition and, occasionally, razzmatazz. This year’s Vert, designed by Diez Office and urban greening specialists OMCºC is not lacking any of these qualities. The structure has been erected at Chelsea College of Arts as a 10m-tall triangular timber framework, onto which a series of nets provide opportunities for climbing plants to ascend, providing the shade, biodiversity and carbon absorption properties normally offered by urban trees, but growing at a far quicker rate. The results are beautiful (the netting has some visual resonances with Cedric Price’s Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo), but this is perhaps the least of Vert’s achievements. The project was commissioned by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), a body with a history of launching interesting timber structures during LDF, and Vert is being used as a testbed for a number of different research projects: OMCºC’s innovative planter system, but also the structural potential of red oak glulam, a new wood product that makes architectural use of a tree species that grows in abundance in the US. Vert is beautifully engineered and a pleasant public space (Disegno particularly liked that the same orange netting was used to create seating for visitors and a cradle for the climbing plants), but also provides plenty of food for thought: it raises questions around the role of plants in cities, the provenance and sustainability of materials, and the technical potential of timber architecture. When razzmatazz comes with research, everyone wins.

Vert: Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip St, SW1P 4JU

Making Matters

“It was designed[…] to illustrate the paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics”; “Even though I don’t like eating eggs, I love its elegance.”

Schrödinger's Cat and a walnut egg cup are clearly not natural bedfellows, yet they nevertheless represent two different answers to a question posed by designers Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd for their LDF exhibition, Well Made. The pair had invited practitioners, writers and curators from across the field to nominate something that they believed to be “well made” (Schrödinger's Cat as one idea is owed to Dunne & Raby, the egg cup to Nurgul Yardim Mericliler)), and the results proved delightfully eclectic, ranging across social systems, mechanical mechanisms, traditional crafts, and more. Design shows that invite designers to nominate everyday objects or components that they find beautiful and inspiring are perennially popular, and there are plenty of such pieces in Well Made, but these selections were carefully juxtaposed against nominations that veered into less familiar territory: Grant Gibson’s nomination of the Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites (a purposefully badly made piece of consumer electronics), Gemma Matthias’s reflection on zero waste period pads, and Sophie Thomas’s selection of obsolete Victorian bone toothbrushes amongst them. The nominators, as well as Pearson Lloyd as curators, deserve credit for how catholic Well Made proved in its tastes, offering diverse, contradictory and complementary definitions of what a “well made” thing might represent today. Walking through the exhibition (which cleverly exhibited all of its objects with perfect equality in straight lines, organised alphabetically by nominator), it was impossible not to reflect on the different criteria, priorities, ideas and tastes that rub up against one another in design. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the exhibition was agreeing with some definitions and balking at others. A simple show, then, but one perfectly calculated to reveal the richness and diversity of its topic.

Well Made: Pearson Lloyd 1-3 Yorkton Street, E2 8NH

Heiter X's table visitors can forage food from (image: Alana Proosa, courtesy of the Protopia Collective).

Eating Estonia

There are few LDF events which strictly need to be experienced in person, with many seemingly designed with Instagram experience in mind, but artist Heiter X’s foraging exhibition at SoShiro is one. Heiter X’s clay table hosts a living landscape from which visitors can pick and eat earthy green moss and syrupy pine cones from the artist’s native Estonia. The exhibition also marks the launch of the Protopia Collective, which brings together artists working with food and nature, and includes jewellery designer Erik Merisalu’s sculptural tools with claw-like blades, and Grounding Sisters’ embroidered aprons people can use to gather foraged goods into their laps. Although the exhibition celebrates the practice of foraging, Heiter X has a disapproving reaction to the UK’s increasingly popular group foraging tours. “For me, that’s so weird,” she says. “First of all, Estonians don’t want to interact with other people. But also, one rule of foraging is that you can only pick as much as you need.” Soshiro’s exhibit transports not just the tastes of Estonia to London, but also the nation’s respectful culture of foraging. “I’ve been foraging since I was a child, I think every Estonian has,” Heiter X says. “Everyone has their own mushroom spots that they don’t tell anyone else about.”

Foraged: 23 Welbeck St, London W1G 8DZ

Yinka’s wonderland

Yinka Ilori’s eye-catching and uplifting designs are perfect for creating enticing installations at festivals. Entering his pop-up shop inside a glass room in The Hoxton Hotel feels like going inside a colourful snow globe, where architectural display units inspired by Burkinabe houses and mosques exhibit homeware in every colour of the rainbow. Although many of the products on display have existed since Ilori launched his homeware brand in 2020, for his latest designs he has created original moulds rather than using decals to add patterns and affirmations to plates and mugs in recognisable shapes. The result are green plates with ridged yellow edges like sunbeams, and a yellow and orange ombre jug with a childishly large handle and a wide lilac mouth shaped like a paper milk carton. Ilori’s favourite piece of all, however, isn’t for sale: it’s a sofa upholstered with pink, yellow and orange fabric in a pattern of circles and ovals, and, although it isn’t available to buy just now, more upholstery may be on the cards for the future.

Yinka Ilori Objects Pop-up Shop: 81 Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3HU

Yara Abu Aataya's colourful hourglasses (image: Anežka Horová).

Lost in time

As a counterpoint to the hectic energy of LDF, designer Yara Abu Aataya's exhibition aims to recapture the feeling of having endless time to herself that she felt during the pandemic. Her large hourglasses softly spill sand, their bottom triangles slowly becoming more opaque while the top ones lighten their load. “Every flip has one to five minutes difference, so even though society is so strict about efficiency and everything is measured, these hourglasses support the idea of being lost in time,” she says. Born in Gaza and living in Prague, Abu Aataya has designed each hourglass to use two colours to represent the duality of her cultural identity, pairing Czech glass with sand that symbolises the Arabian desert. The hourglasses reflect Abu Aataya’s habit of waking up early to have an hour to herself, a self-care practice which has become ever more necessary over the last year as she has become a prominent Palestinian activist. Currently, she has an installation in the National Gallery Prague where she and collective stopgenocidevgaze have left an olive tree to slowly die in the museum to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the upsurge of violence in the West Bank. “I'm not sleeping much, I don't have weekends,” she says. “But I had today one hour of sunlight and Sudoku.”

~ 1 hour glass collection: 309 Bethnal Green Road, Tower Hamlets London, E2 6AH

Installing Andu Masebo's shelves in the Making Room (image: Diogo).

Smelling Sawdust

Andu Masebo and Mikey Krzyzanowski’s Making Room is a hive of activity. Everyone is pleasantly absorbed in creating hooks from a variety of materials as part of a workshop led by Mitre & Mondays, the room buzzing with purpose as participants hand each other drills or help each other tie up a bit of string. The formerly vacant shop unit smells strongly of sawdust, and at either end of it are Masebo’s simple wooden pieces of furniture which are made elegant by their rounded edges and hidden fixtures and fittings. These pieces have an unfussy charm that mimics the environment of the workshops themselves: one armchair has a wide, welcoming seat and a backrest that is tipped upwards like it’s about to greet you. Throughout LDF, the room will host workshops led by a range of creatives and educators, from florist Galerie Navy to Stacie Woolsey, founder of DIY education programme Make Your Own Masters. The objects made in each workshop will be exhibited next to Masebo’s pieces, with the title of the exhibition, Making Room, referencing both furnishing a room and creating space for new people to enter the design industry.

Andu Masebo & Mikey Krzyzanowski’s Making Room: 237 Brompton Road, SW7 2RW

Coffee and a biscuit

“London Design Festival is kind of a drop in the ocean in London,” Josef Shanley-Jackson, co founder of Mitre & Mondays says, gesturing to the highways of people criss-crossing Granary Square. This year for LDF, the design studio wanted their work to be seen by the general public rather than just a niche design audience, so the team decided to drive a van around London handing out small metal trays crafted precisely to hold a coffee mug and a digestive biscuit. The van is tiny and bright blue, with rounded corners like a mint lozenge, and it’s emblazoned with an American diner-style red and white logo that reads “Café Tolerance”. Playing on the design industry’s interest in tolerance – the amount a dimension can vary while still allowing a product to be manufactured accurately – Mitre & Mondays decided to broaden this theme outwards to spark discussions about tolerance in society. The studio are planning to turn their LDF conversations into an audio essay and use the experience as inspiration for other future projects. “Design sometimes gets a bit of an easy ride, it doesn't always engage with what's going on socially as much as art and literature does, it’s a bit of a slower moving beast,” Shanley-Jackson says. “We just wanted to create a space which allowed people to have those sorts of conversations.”

Café Tolerance: Various locations

Bisila Noha's vessel and Shanti Bell's plywood sculptures (image: Valdis Bicevskis).

Draping the body

POoR Collective’s show is full of heart. The exhibition celebrates the talent of emerging artists and designers, bringing together an impressive array of woodwork, including Myles Igwebuike’s stool carved with symbols from Igbo mythology, Darren Appiagyei’s bowl with hundreds of black dots painstakingly singed into its pale surface, and Giles Tettey Nartey’s table carved with bumps and dents to evoke the scars and stories of the body. Bisila Noha’s ceramic vessel was also inspired by the body, and captures the movement of dance with a line of fingermarks flowing down it like a stream of water, while Shanti Bell’s large plywood panels have ridges which hold visitors’ bodies in unexpectedly cosy positions. Bell has a background in fashion, and her pieces drape wood like fabric, using it to hold the body like clothes do. “I’m offering these pieces up to be interacted with, so they're not perfect, because I know that human body isn't, and we as people aren’t,” Bell says. “If you get them a bit muddy or if you knock into them, that's okay. These pieces will receive you as you are, and hold the memories of the people who sat in them before.”

POWERSHIIFT 2024: 33 Thurloe Place, SW7 2HQ

LDF 2024 Round Up

Introducing: The Crit