Creative Autumn in London: when a Mayor is making is job

LDF and Frieze: eight years of public planning to let the Capital excelling

section: blog

28-10-2011
categories: Design, Architecture, Art, Corporate,

» archive blog

Creative Autumn in London: when a Mayor is making is job

LDF and Frieze: eight years of public planning to let the Capital excelling

Creative London in Autumn? It’s sounding as an adv buzz, instead is a platform that could potentially have envy around the globe, in times of recession or in expansion. Indeed, Creative London is one of the most rewarding public re-branding of the UK world destination, a capital that has been always perceived as the mecca of creativity but is not sleeping on its past success or on the diffused perception of its highest qualification as creative industry best market.


Mayor of London bets on design and arts and destines September and October – since eight years for London Design Festival and its accessories and the same years for Frieze and the minor art fairs – to create extra humus to spell the city as a key destination for buyers, collectors, art and design officers, the communication and publishers’ circus, creative minds.


This year Mayor of London destined 250,000 GBP to London Design Festival (September 17.25, 2011), who held also long time private sponsors and partners, and is distributed all over London with six design districts (Brompton and Plimco at West, East/Shoreditch Triangle, Covent Garden and Fitzrovia, Clerkenwell) plus few design sub-fairs or special saloons (Tent, Tramshead, decorex, designjunction, Craft, 100% Design).


LDF offered around 300 events (most of them little shows, or conferences panels or artists’ run spaces if we exclude the big V&A shows and the public installations) mixing new designers with the major brands commercial initiatives, as the B&B Italia 10th anniversary with a show in the super-shop of the Italian furniture company. The figures of the London flagship store are made especially with contract, a company manager said during a breakfast held for the press: the upstairs offices are often busy of architects and partners asking B&B bespoke proposals for this business: hotels, restaurants, boats. On spring 2012 three new Central London hotels (Bulgari by Citterio, Cafè Royal by David Chipperfield, Me Hotel by Forster and Partners) will be opened with major parts of interiors made by B&B. Sad to say, Skitsch store just in front of B&B has been closed. Just one year ago it was the epicentro of brand new furniture during LDF and ahead.


If we think that Milan council gave to September 2011 Fashion Week  a sponsorship of 200.000 euro, the half than previous year, and does not give a financial aid to Fuorisalone (apart locations and special partnerships with publishers) hosting more than 600 events since 20 years and really standing as the world leading furniture fair (not a pop festival as LDF), we can point about the lack of vision of Italian public officers. But, this is sadly not a fresh news, given the clarity on how all around Europe Northern Italy is perceived: stuck or, worst, regressive.


Getting back to what was striking at LDF, we have a small, precious bouquet of smart pieces and smart building processes, as well as a good party for concepts: this latter can be read in the next days on our blog.


Foldboat by product designers Max Frommeld and Arno Mathies was hosted at Tom Dixon’s ‘Multiplex at The Dock’. It is a back-pack perfect scenario, but also a delicious family or single mean for a superb lake picnic: a plastic boat obtained by transforming a flat sheet (by a single person) in 2 minutes only using 3 components (the size is 2.5mx1.5m). Dixon’s location, at the edge of the West after chic Holland Park and just before the new area leading to East, was also showing new copper lights and glass by the hosting firm and a nice performance by one of the best art&poster shops in London.



Fumi Gallery, the East new address for limited edition design, was launching a brand new exhibit with three solo shows under the perfect title Studioware: collections made and manufactured in the invited designers’studios whose public prices have to be sustainable even if objects are handmade (this was part of the brief the gallery owners, Sam Pratt and Valerio  Capo, gave to the designers while finetuning the show).



Max Lamb invents and builds a wood furniture collection in which the modular tubes are dictating functions, forms or suggesting aggregations.  Studio Glithero performs new and more portable (i.e. cheaper) plaster mirrors in strong colour match plus a collection of paper planes; Johannes Nagel’s is searching the perfect “form killer” with stunning ceramics.



The Shoreditch gallery also welcomed visitors at the renewed Andaz hotel (a former degraded hotel now a charming address also for a drink after work) with a poetic and gigantic installation for a champagne brand, signed by Rowan Mersh. Iambic Rhythm is pure poetry about biology and physics of the human body: a long bunch of ropes hang from the ceiling of the Rotunda six-storeys ends downstairs in the lobby area where ropes attach to a moving structure. Once beating or shaking as the heart, the structure gives the movement to the ropes that sound as a cardiac rhythm. Unsatisfied with the result (the structure was crossing the diameter of the chest of ropes instead of being parallel, due to a last minute questioning by the hotel staff) but deeply touched by the incredible volume the work obtained by exploiting the height of the building, Mersh has been clear about the project: “It is a work devoted to the heart-breaking power of English language and poetry, plus a reconstruction of the autonomous source of hear-like pulse thanks to the exceptional size of the building and the tension space-meaning”.

copyright pr/undercover

» related contents