The Festival Returns
Nebbia Works's Between Forests and Skies, installed at the V&A (image: Ed Reeve).
Whisper it, but Disegno wasn’t exactly crushed when Covid-19 meant that the 2020 London Design Festival (LDF) was forced to go ahead in a severely truncated form.
It’s not that there’s anything specifically the matter with LDF, but simply that it exhibits many of the traditional issues that the festival/biennale format suffers from worldwide: critically engaged exhibitions and installations often slip to the periphery, bludgeoned into submission by glitzy, public-facing “Landmark Projects”; a general bloat and disparate curation within the programming paints a picture of design as an unwieldy jalopy of a discipline, careering wildly between the profound, the pretentious and the banal (which is, in truth, probably an accurate reflection of the field, but god knows what non-design audiences make of it); and finally a suspicion that these festivals are less a celebration of design per se, and more a celebration of the networking and Prosecco receptions that it enables. Not bad things in themselves, but certainly not Covid-compliant. In challenging circumstances, a year without the festival firing on all cylinders proved rather welcome.
It’s now 2021, however, and the UK seems to have declared the pandemic over (only 231,241 new cases in the past seven days!). After a year off, LDF was back last week in a more recognisable form – well, more or less. While Covid precautions varied between venues, LDF 2021 was for the most part a quieter, less raucous event than previous years. Exhibiting brands seemed to have scaled back in light of ongoing uncertainty caused by the pandemic (as well as the obvious loss of time earlier in the year to actually design and construct installations), while an understandable decrease in international visitors and exhibitors seemed clear. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the V&A, a site which traditionally serves as the central hub of the festival, housing multiple large-scale installations. This year, however, programming was stripped back, with the role of public-facing content largely falling to Nebbia Works's Between Forests and Skies: a self-supporting aluminium pavilion for the museum’s John Madejski Garden, propped up by cut out sections of material that folded down from the canopy like slender fingers.
Curated by the V&A as opposed to LDF itself, Between Forests and Skies proved itself one of the better headline installations to take up residence in the museum from recent festivals. Beautiful and possessed of a sense of spectacle, undoubtedly, but Nebbia’s work seemed to have more of a critical purpose than some previous incumbents of the space: the project speaks of light, minimal construction (important in a time of climate collapse) and, crucially, its environmental footprint has been tracked from the aluminium’s extraction through to its production, fabrication and installation. Most importantly, the pavilion will be fully recycled at a smelting facility at the end of its lifespan: a step that seems obvious, but which simply isn’t the case for many structures of this kind, most of which end up in limbo once their week of display is over. If festivals are going to exhibit temporary structures, having a well-resolved plan for their end of life seems the least they can do.
The new Design District development at Greenwich Peninsula (image: image: Taran Wilkhu).
If the V&A was more restrained than in previous years, bombast and scale was provided via the partial opening of Design District, a new “purpose-built hub for the creative industries”. Design District forms a part of developer Knight Dragon’s £8.4bn Greenwich Peninsula masterplan, which proposes to create 17,500 homes and 70,000sqm of office space across the 80-hectare riverside site. In an area of London that has seen more than its fair share of failed or else underwhelming projects – step forward Santiago Calatrava’s abandoned towers, the critically panned Tide elevated garden path, and a largely redundant cable car whose chief success is in shoehorning Emirates branding into the London Tube map – Knight Dragon is relying on Design District to be a success and, in turn, boost the prestige of the peninsula as a whole. The developer has commissioned eight architects – exciting practices such as Mole, David Kohn and 00 among the generally stellar line-up – to create a series of 16 buildings that are planned to provide working spaces for 1,800 people once completed and fully occupied.
It’s difficult to know what to make of Design District. Many of the buildings are inventive, visually arresting (Disegno particularly enjoyed SelgasCano’s caterpillar food hall) and may prove to be excellent working spaces. And Certainly, the basic rent being charged for space in the development (£5 per square foot for the first 12 months of a tenancy, ultimately rising to a site-wide, blended-rent target of £25 per square foot, with a minimum rate of £7) seems very good indeed, although critics have pointed out that a service rate is not included in this. The scheme, Knight Dragon claims, will provide affordable, long-term studio spaces to creative practices, and put an end to the cycle of designers and their ilk being priced out of neighbourhoods once developers move in, drawn there in part by the cultural cachet generated by the very tenants they then force out.
A building by David Kohn Architects, created for Design District (image: Taran Wilkhu).
Feeling at all uncomfortable? Knight Dragon’s solution to the problem, at least under one interpretation, is to help creative businesses by pre-installing them within the heart of one of those big-money developments that so frequently threaten them, using their output as a reactor core of cultural credibility that can power the money-making potential of the surrounding peninsula for years to come. Why hunt creatives across the capital, the argument might run, if you can farm them in a central location? More generally, top-down developments of this ilk raise any number of difficult questions and while Design District no doubt is genuine about its good intentions, it is also clear that the designers it will house are commodities as well as tenants: they are a marketing tool for the surrounding peninsula, and those who buy into the development are likely doing so, at least in part, because of their presence there.
It’s tempting to play the pragmatist. Provided that the designers also benefit from this arrangement, do these concerns actually matter to the issue at hand? Big-money developments aren’t going away any time soon (and design has an irritating tendency to paint itself as entirely divorced from the worlds of commerce and development when these discussions come up) and affordable studio space is not to be sniffed at: Design District may not be how we would want creative neighbourhoods to spring up in a perfect world but, well, you know the rest. What this does mean, however, is that the plan has little margin for error. If Design District is to be viewed positively, then it has to deliver what it has promised. If designers move there and find themselves supported and nourished by a bustling community of peers, then the district will have succeeded and proven itself a positive addition to London’s design community. If not, there is little that can be said in its favour, bar, perhaps, praise for its decision to eschew architecture’s leading lights in favour of smaller, more interesting practices.
SelgasCano’s canteen structure for the development (image: Taran Wilkhu).
As to what will happen over the coming years, Disegno can’t say – and given that many tenants are yet to move in, and several buildings remain unfinished, it seems early to declare the neighbourhood as being full of “charm and energy and intrigue” as it has been lauded elsewhere – but a reason for optimism may be found in one of Greenwich Peninsula’s first forays into culture. Since opening in 2015, the peninsula’s Now Gallery has proven itself to be a superb addition to London's cultural life, with its curatorial team of Jemima Burrill and Kaia Charles delivering a series of critically engaged, progressive, and surprising shows, often exhibiting emerging practitioners before they have been highlighted elsewhere. If Burrill and Charles’s work is the model for Design District as a whole, there is good reason to be hopeful.
Bouroullec Père at the Jasper Morrison Shop (image: Jasper Morrison Studio).
Despite its significance, however, the scale of Design District was out of keeping with the remainder of the festival, where many of the most successful, widely discussed initiatives kept things small and discrete, stripping back the bombast in favour of exhibitions and projects that could deliver exactly what they promised. Bouroullec Père at Jasper Morrison Shop in Shoreditch was perhaps the epitome of this: nothing more than a wall display of wooden spoons, beautifully hand-carved by Gabriel Bouroullec, father to the French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. It was a display fully in keeping with the sensibilities and persona of Morrison – a designer who has previously exhibited collections of adhesive tapes and drinking glasses – and which felt like a perfect antidote to the breathless claims for design’s potency often made by the biennale/festival format. Bouroullec Père was beautiful spoons, beautifully made, all available for purchase – and that was enough.
New Adventures in Cardboard by Brown Office (image: Andy Stagg).
Similarly simple, albeit shifting into the deeper waters of sustainability and material usage, was Brown Office’s New Adventures in Cardboard, a project installed in Brompton Design District, whose curator Jane Withers has long since established the area as the go-to district for critically engaged content. New Adventures in Cardboard saw studio head Dean Brown set up shop in a garage space, spending the week gradually assembling the mounds of cardboard he had acquired over lockdown into fantastical, funny and occasionally even functional contraptions. From cardboard cats to spinning doodads, totem poles to electric hand fans, Brown let his imagination run wild (well trained, no doubt, from his role as a member of Goldsmith’s excellent Interaction Research Studio), creating objects that were immediately delightful, but which also raised good questions surrounding material culture: “A less wasteful society could appreciate cardboard as a material more fundamental to living,” Brown wrote. “When reconsidered as a raw material it can be sourced locally and worked resourcefully, without specialist equipment or infrastructure. It is inherently sturdy, malleable, repairable and takes on patina through use. It is a versatile container and therefore is particularly interesting when used to house electronics.”
Michael Marriott’s clock design for The Unboxing Show (image: Peter Marigold).
Cardboard also provided the inspiration for one of the undoubted highlights of the festival: Peter Marigold’s The Unboxing Show at King’s Cross Design District. The Unboxing Show was a simple idea. Marigold invited a group of designers to create works out of waste cardboard, before sharing the digital plans such that templates could be cut onsite by a CNC machine and then used by visitors to the space to assemble and customise the designs. The objects themselves were gleeful, silly and utterly charming – Liliana Ovalle’s altarpiece, Yuri Suzuki’s record player, and Chen Chen and Kai Williams’ elaborate cat scratcher among them – with their immediacy and openness to play and experimentation sugaring the pill of the project’s more serious message around consumer waste and material culture. The Unboxing Show was everything that programming for a design festival should be: accessible, participatory, engaged with serious issues within contemporary design culture, and inviting to a wide audience. Those from within design could marvel at the objects on display – Michael Marriot’s beautifully pared back clocks were a personal favourite for Disegno – while those new to the discipline found a welcoming route in that nevertheless spoke of the field’s wit and worth.
One of The Unboxing Show’s participants, Daniel Eatock, was responsible for another of the festival’s jewels: Absorbed, Squeezed, Rolled. Hosted at Art Practice Gallery in Shoreditch, Absorbed, Squeezed, Rolled was a riotous exploration of process, with Eatock displaying his Rolling Pin paintings, Clip Frame paintings and Felt Trip Prints, setting the relatively small space alight with his designs’ colour and vibrancy. All of Eatock’s work is beautiful and fascinating, but the highlight of the show was an edition of 50 A4 sheets, crumpled into balls and then left for 24 hours in a box with a set of Winsor & Newton Promarkers resting on their outer surface. Over the course of those hours, the paper absorbed the ink from the markers, flooding the white sheet with a melange of swirling hues. Eatock had suspended all 50 of these crumpled sheets from the roof of the space on string, like kaleidoscopic asteroids, inviting visitors to buy each sheet on the basis of its outer form alone – a clue as to how the colours might have been absorbed inside. Colourful, a little mysterious, and created by a fantastical material process: what’s not to like?
Woodwork by Jan Hendzel Studio for Against the Grain, an exhibition of which Hendzel is the co-organiser (image: George Baggaley).
It is small, thoughtful shows like those created by Brown, Marigold and Eatock that tend to prove the lifeblood of design festivals. Away from the pomp and grandeur of landmark projects, it is those who create personal, more reflective work that tend to linger longest in the memory. What a pleasure it was then to see the launch of Southwark South Design District, a new region for the festival created by Jan Hendzel Studio and Pempeople. Covering Peckham, Old Kent Road and Camberwell, Southwark South shone a light on an area of London that can sometimes feel remote from the city’s more central regions (and it remains a real problem, particularly for international visitors, that LDF is spread over such a vast area), spotlighting a number of interesting practices working in Southwark. It is no easy thing to establish a meaningful new district in a citywide festival that is already bloated and diffuse, but Southwark South set its stall out early with Against the Grain, a headline exhibition at Copeland Gallery organised by Hendzel and Fels.
Vessels made from milk protein, designed by Tessa Silva (image: George Baggaley).
Against the Grain, a little like Bouroullec Père, clearly knew its own mind. Hendzel and Fels had assembled a group of designers (with the curation pleasingly skewed towards younger, less heralded practices) whose work focuses on experimentation with a given material. Studio ThusThat displayed a series of domestic objects forms created from copper-recycling slag, Tessa Silva a number of chubby vessels formed from a material produced using milk protein, and Stuart Haygarth showed a vast, glittering chandelier, hung with stalactites of vintage crystal glassware – decanters, gravy boats, ashtrays. The exhibits were loosely curated around ideas of sustainability (although small-scale studios working with waste materials are not, truth told, those that the sustainability debate urgently needs to focus on), but this loose grouping seemed almost beside the point – Against the Grain delighted through its sheer eclecticism. This was a show of interesting designers doing interesting things with material; each utterly unlike one another, the pleasure lie in seeing the sheer breadth and depth of what designers explore when left to their own devices. In one room, Hendzel’s exquisite woodwork, rich in detail and construction complexity; in another, Pierre Castignola’s Frankenstein-esque Copytopia plastic garden chairs, created from sampling elements from various patented copies and remakes of the anonymous original.
Pierre Castignola’s Copytopia project (image: George Baggaley).
If Against the Grain is any guide, Southwark South is in good hands for the years ahead, but the exhibition also felt like a fitting summation of this year’s LDF more generally. Largely stripped of its pageantry and grandeur, the 2021 edition of the festival succeeded through a series of small displays of thought-provoking design. In a year in which things are not back to normal, no matter what the UK’s government might like us to believe, it felt suitably low-key – and so much the better for it. Pandemic allowing, LDF 2022 will no doubt restore the festival’s pomp and scale. It will not necessarily be better for it.
Words Oli Stratford