The 2015 London Design Festival, an annual event held to celebrate and promote London as "the design capital of the world," will run this year between the 19th and 27th September. As a platform for some of the capital's major trade shows, the city-wide event aims to showcase exhibitors from across the world at a series of 'Design Destinations' — places at which established and emerging designers, manufacturers and brands can present their products and innovations.
WikiHouse, the open-source platform for designing and sharing house designs that anyone can be manufacture and assemble in days with no construction skills, has unveiled 'WikiHouse 4.0' their first ever two-storey design at this year's London Design Festival. Built by a team of volunteers and costing less than £50,000, the new prototype on display at The Building Centre also demonstrates the possibilities of other open source systems, with the code for the electrics, ventilation system and sensors all available on open-source platforms.
More on WikiHouse 4.0 after the break
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Terence Conran asked nine of his friends in the design world "What have you always wanted in your home, but have never been able to find?" The result is The Wish List, a set of ten projects dreamed up by big name designers such as Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, but designed and crafted in collaboration with emerging designers.
Sponsored by the American Hardwood Export Council, the only restriction was that the product had to be made of wood, leading to designs ranging from Foster's modest geometric pencil sharpeners to Paul Smith's dream garden shed.
As part of the 2014 London Design Festival, the resulting ten products will be on show at the V&A Museum until October 24th.
Richard Rogers has been honored with the Coutts Lifetime Achievement Medal for his “significant and fundamental contributions to the design industry,” an announcement made as part of the London Design Festival in Rogers’ newly completed Leadenhall Building.
“He has played a leading role in designing buildings that made us think again about how we use them and how they function,” stated London Design Festival director Ben Evans. :His eminence is global, and he is part of a golden era of leading British architects who not only reshaped our city but also reshaped the world to some capacity.”
Zaha Hadid Architects has constructed an experimental structure on the grounds of London’s V&A Museum, just in time for the London Design Festival. The temporary installation is the practice’s thinnest shell structure to date, testing new design and construction technologies for achieving minimal material thickness while “investigating the relationship between formal arrangement and structural performance.”
With a world plagued by the current economic crisis, David Chipperfield fears that the architects’ role is shrinking and the professions ability to influence the shape of our cities is diminishing.
Since the inauguration of this year’s Venice Biennale, Chipperfield has been amidst of a few heated debates, most notably debunking the harsh criticism of Coop Himmelb(lau)’s Wolf Prix – who claimed the “hollow” event was “no longer about lively discussion and criticism of topics in contemporary architecture” – by affirming Prix “hadn’t even visited Venice”.
Interestingly, Chipperfield has now initiated a debate, using similar rhetoric as Prix, that calls attention to the dwindling role of the architect and the impotence of contemporary architecture. The catch? He blames politicians.
Continue after the break for more.
While the excitement builds for the Olympic Games this summer, London is also preparing for their Design Festival of mid-September. In a joint effort between Arup and Sound and Music, the installation at Trafalgar Square will focus on the idea of design you cannot see by creating a black rubberized portal that will transport visitors to inaccessible places and remote environments through a series of three-dimensional soundscapes created by leading musicians and sound designers. By isolating the sense of sound, visitors will be submerged in a completely new environment as they stand in one of the busiest squares in the world.
More about BE OPEN after the break.
.jpg?1411136478 "Pencil Sharpener / Norman Foster + Norie Matsumoto. Image © Petr Krejčí")
.jpg?1411136290 "Workspace / Terence Conran + Sebastian Cox. Image © Petr Krejčí")
.jpg?1411138048 "Ladder / Richard Rogers, Ab Rogers + Xenia Moseley. Image © Petr Krejčí")
.jpg?1411138170 "Shed / Paul Smith + Nathalie de Leval. Image © Petr Krejčí")