Inside Vitra Tramshed in Shoreditch (image: Taran Wilkhu).

The next instalment of Disegno’s guide to London Design Festival (LDF) 2022 includes glass blowing on the lawn of the V&A, Vitra launching its London HQ, and a chance to buy “the world’s most beautiful broom”.

Vitra Tramshed is the furniture company’s new London showroom (image: Taran Wilkhu).

Welcome to the club

The new London Vitra showroom has history. A Victorian-era electrical substation for the East London Tramway, it languished in obscurity while the late Terence Conran’s dream of turning it into a Conran store were thwarted by the 2008 financial crash. In 2013, architects Waugh Thistleton and chef Mark Hix turned the space into Tramshed, the testosterone-fuelled steak-or-chicken restaurant replete with formaldehyde-filled farmyard animals courtesy of Damien Hirst. Hix’s restaurant empire fell victim to the pandemic in 2020, but the cavernous Tramshed lives on through Vitra, who have laboriously cleared out the hospitality detritus and given it a careful sprucing. Fans of shiny subway tiles and big steel beams need not fear, the restoration is a very light touch; apart from a few fresh licks of paint here and there, the Grade II-listed building remains unmolested. It’s a brilliant way to showcase how Vitra’s Club Office concept – debuting here for the first time outside the company’s Swiss HQ – can work for any space, new or old. Silver curtains cascade down from the rafters to shield a curving pink Soft Work sofa and a quirky foot-shaped floor pillow. A hefty terrazzo bar down one side serves coffee during the day and cocktails at night. This is very much a working showroom, with London Vitra staff and friends of the brand invited to use The Club with its its well-appointed nooks and crannies to park their laptops. Downstairs, an unprepossessing basement has been transformed into a white cube-style gallery space holding curated displays that are in conversation with Vitra Design Museum exhibitions. A rainbow display of chairs echos Sabine Marcelis’ Colour Rush! at the Schaudepot (see Disegno #33), for instance, while LDF visitors can see the new edition of the Jean Prouvé Fauteuil Kangourou in beige bouclé. A limited run will go on sale this week but hurry – the blue version that dropped in June sold out in just 15 minutes.

Vitra Showroom Tramshed, Rivington Street, EC2A 3LX

Early work

One of the highlights of each LDF is the opportunity to visit the Shoreditch studio of Jasper Morrison, which has built a fine reputation for its annual exhibitions exploring unheralded elements of visual culture and vernacular design: Gabriel Bouroullec’s carved wooden spoons (2021), ceramics from Sargadelos (2018), sticky tapes (2012), and design books (2013), among others. The studio’s displays are modest, but always curious and illuminating, and it was therefore interesting to see the team turn their attention this year to their own founder’s student work and early-career output. Titled Early Work, the exhibition is a study of pieces from the 1980s (and one piece from 1990), when Morrison worked designing furniture from ready-made components that he subsequently sold in small batches (many of which the designer has recently reacquired). It offers a fascinating picture of both a moment in London’s design history, but also Morrison’s own career and progression as a designer: there is a clear continuity between Morrison’s early and later work (an economy and intelligence in form and construction, for instance), but the early works also possess a humour and exuberance that is rawer and more explicit than that which emerges in the designer’s later output for manufacturers (the superb 1987 Coat Stand, which comprises the cork-topped bases of two office chairs pressed into a length of air-conditioning ducting, is a case in point). The works are beautiful and intriguing – complemented by old sketch books which the studio note are surprising for the quantity of text in comparison to drawings that they contain – and the exhibition is capped off by detailed and amusing captions written by Morrison and studio member Miranda Clow, which offer a charming and informative guide through Morrison’s life and career (Disegno particularly enjoyed the mention of Berlin chemists – the source of the laboratory equipment employed in the 1983 Laboratory Light – growing “confused and impatient at [Morrison’s] visits”). Highly recommended.

Early Work: 24b Kingsland Road, E2 8DA

A coterie of creatives turned dead wood into dead good for SCP’s One Tree (image: Robbie Wallace).

Ashes to ash

There is something deeply poetic about One Tree, a communal effort to create beauty out of disease and untimely death. When SCP founder Sheridan Coakley discovered that a magnificent ash tree in his back garden had succumbed to ash dieback, he was determined that it would end up as more than firewood. A band of artists, designers and craftspeople rallied for a day-long festival of felling, with Sebastian Cox and Moe Redish manning their mobile sawmill to divvy up the tree. Some took just boards, some took whacking great chunks, and the results are fascinating to see exhibited in the room above their Shoreditch showroom. Faye Toogood turned the massive gnarled stump into a smooth love seat, while Cox shaved delicate raw-edged strips off to frame a long pendant lamp. Max Bainbridge whittled bulbous bowls and Redish experimented with fire and glass to create a pagan’s playground of objects and vases. It’s amazing to see the different shapes and styles that can all come out of just one tree. Grant Wilkinson and Teresa Rivera created a three-backed bench that looks like it wouldn’t be amiss in the new elves-and-dwarves filled show Ring of Power, while Oscar Coakley’s scaffold board smiley face hanging from a chain looks like it came straight out of a cottagecore club night. Having evolved in a different environment from the Hymenoscyphus fraxineus fungus that causes dieback, European ash is uniquely vulnerable to the disease that causes Chinese ash little trouble. But here a co-evolution of creatives has demonstrated the design diversity that can come from a single branching tree.

One Tree, SCP, 135-139 Curtain Rd, London EC2A 3BX

Brooms for sale

Much like Jasper Morrison, the designer Michael Marriott is a practitioner who is worth appreciating not solely for the quality of his design work, but also for his reflections upon how the field intersects with everyday life, and the lightness of touch and humour with which he operates. They’re qualities evident in abundance in Marriott’s output for this years LDF, which sees the designer turn shopkeeper and take over Leila’s Shop with his Wood Metal Plastic project, as well as exhibiting a trimmed down edition of the superb Kioskö installation that he originally designed for the Radical Acts biennial at Harewood House. The centrepiece of the show is Alicante (“the world’s most beautiful broom”, which Marriott has imported from Spain), but the space is packed out with delightful, beautifully designed and made objects, which are all available at affordable prices (with affordable here meaning roughly under £20 in most cases, as opposed to the usual design trick of affordable meaning £500 as opposed to £800). Instead of luxury design in its conventional sense, Marriott relishes in the readymade, the vernacular and the gleefully useful and handy, and his enthusiasm for this forms of design is infectious – it says a lot that he’s put a broom centre stage and it doesn’t seem odd in the slightest. The space closes today (Wednesday 21 September) so get down while you still can.

Wood Metal Plastic: Leila’s Shop, 15-17 Calvert Avenue, E2 7JP

Need more friends? You can always print them (image: Alex Sarginson).

In the company of friends

A very happy 25th anniversary to Pearson Lloyd, who is celebrating its quarter centenary with a neat retrospective of projects themed around change and making called, of course, Change Making. Quite a lot has happened fast over the past two and a half decades, as you may have noticed. The exhibition, which is part of the Shoreditch Design Tirangle, is a window into the thinking that went on behind notable pieces such as the Totem range for Joseph Joseph, as well as projects such as their redesign of 20 NHS trust A&E departments. Special mention has to go to the corner dedicated to bFriends collection that Pearson Lloyd designed for Bene, a window display filled with 3D-printed creations from the sustainable desk accessories collection. The colourful products range from desk tidies to little stacking animals printed from biodegradable plastic made out of recovered post-consumer waste. A 3D printer next to the window chugs away creating more chums for the stack of bFriends. It’s a fitting tribute to the importance of circular economy principles and a good social circle, underscored by Pearson’s Lloyd list of the friends it credits for a successful 25 years, placed pride of place by the entrance.

Change Making, Pearson Lloyd, 1 - 3 Yorkton Street, E2 8NH

You can watch Omer Arbel work live at the V&A (image: Fahim Kassam).

The home fires transported

Material Experiments, an installation created by the artist and designer Omer Arbel is nothing if not ambitious. Arbel has translated his glass blowing studio from Bocci in Vancouver (the design and research studio he founded and leads) and installed it in the John Madejski Garden at the V&A for a week-long residency of glassblowing and material experimentation – one shudders to think of the health and safety discussions that must have been involved. Over the course of the week, Arbel and his team are melting down copper and glass objects sourced from flea markets and antique stores, before using the raw materials to produce 113 examples of his 113 sculptures – spectacularly irregular objects whose making plays around with the expansion rates of copper alloys and glass. Arbel deserves considerable credit for opening up his studio’s work to public observation, with the installation's spirit feeling of a piece with the kind of experimental practice with which Arbel and Bocci have built their reputations. It is, however, an installation that rewards patience and extended observation if you are to enjoy the process it reveals to its fullest. Glassblowing is a slow, painstaking business, with the cursory attention that many LDF exhibits receive from the public likely not to show Material Experiments off to its best (although there are pleasures to be had from just lolling in the garden, enjoying the heat of the furnace). In this respect, Material Experiments makes demands of its audience, but for those willing to put in the time, it offers a satisfying insight into a beautiful process

Material Experiments: John Madejski Garden, V&A, SW7 2RL

LDF 2022 Diaries: Day Two

Night Consumer

Disegno at LDF