Tag Archives: Installations

This Burning Man Temple Blooms for One Night, Then Burns Forever

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Every year, Burning Man erects a temple on the playa, and every year, it burns. That ritual of building and releasing has been part of the festival’s identity for over two decades, and yet each new design still manages to find a fresh way to make the whole thing hit differently. The 2026 edition, called the Temple of the Moon, might be the most quietly devastating one yet.

Designed by artist James Gwertzman, the structure takes its inspiration from the epiphyllum oxypetalum, better known as the Queen of the Night, a cactus flower that blooms exactly once a year, only at night, releasing its fragrance before wilting by morning. It’s the kind of plant that demands you pay attention, because if you’re not watching, you’ll miss it entirely. As a metaphor for grief, for presence, for what it means to witness something you know won’t last, it’s almost uncomfortably perfect.

Designer: James Gwertzman

Gwertzman came to this design through a deeply personal place. He spent years walking alongside a friend as she lost her partner to pancreatic cancer, learning what it means to simply be present in someone else’s pain without trying to fix it. Before all of this, he was trained in theater as a set and lighting designer, then spent decades in the video game industry building interactive worlds. Now he’s building something you can actually stand inside, and then watch burn.

The architectural approach is where things get genuinely fascinating from a design perspective. Gwertzman and his team used a parametric design method, essentially algorithmic generation, to create complex organic curves out of straight pieces of timber. It’s the kind of technical problem-solving that sounds counterintuitive: using math to fake nature. But the result, at least from the renderings, is stunning. From above, the structure looks like a fully bloomed flower, with slatted wooden petals radiating outward from a central chamber.

The center of the temple is built around a hyperboloid structure, a column that flares outward at the top, edged with sharp petals and light-topped wooden pieces that echo the look of a flower’s stamen. Fan-like wooden forms provide shelter and mark the entryways into the mostly enclosed inner space. The renderings feel alive in a way that strictly geometric architecture rarely does, and I think that has everything to do with the fact that the form was borrowed from something real.

What I find most considered about this design is that it doesn’t try to be monumental in the traditional sense. Yes, it’s large, and yes, it will be visible from a distance across the Black Rock Desert. But the experience is designed to be intimate, with petal-like seating areas and an approach path built as a journey rather than a straight line toward the entrance. Eight gateways mark the perimeter fence, each one corresponding to a phase of the moon. The fence panels will feature CNC-cut designs submitted by the community around moon and flower motifs, making the very border of the temple a kind of collective artwork.

That detail matters more than it might seem. Burning Man’s Temple has always been a communal space, a place where people leave names, photos, and notes for loved ones who have died. But designing the threshold of that space to carry the marks of many hands is a meaningful gesture. It says the temple doesn’t belong only to the artist. It belongs to whoever needs it.

The whole structure is scheduled to burn on September 6th, 2026. Everything about it, from the flower that wilts at dawn to the lunar cycle that keeps starting over, points toward that moment. The 2026 Burning Man theme is “Axis Mundi,” meaning the center of the world. It’s a heavy framework to design inside of, but the Temple of the Moon seems to hold it without strain. It’s not trying to be the center of everything. It’s trying to be a place where you can stand still for a moment, feel the weight of what you’re carrying, and let it go.

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Two Artists Wrapped a Farm Greenhouse in a Giant Quilt

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Every winter, Minneapolis does something the rest of the country quietly envies. Instead of hibernating indoors until spring shows up, the city drags its creativity out onto the frozen surface of Lake Harriet and builds a village. Not a regular village, though. An art village, made up of artist-built structures, performances, and interactive installations that take over the ice for four consecutive weekends. That’s the spirit behind Art Shanty Projects, now celebrating its 20th anniversary season, and it gets better with every passing year.

For 2026, one installation has been making the rounds online for all the right reasons. Artists Emily Quandahl and Madeline Cochran were commissioned to create a structure of their own, and what they came up with is genuinely one of the most charming things you’ll see all year. They called it the Quilt Shanty, and the name does exactly what it says.

Designers: Emily Quandahl and Madeline Cochran

The structure is a hoop house, the kind you’d typically find on a farm protecting crops from the cold, wrapped entirely in a patchwork quilt. Big, bold, colorful squares stretch across the curved surface of the frame, sitting right there on the frozen lake like someone dragged their grandmother’s most treasured blanket outside and built a room around it.

The concept is rooted in the tradition of barn quilts, those large painted quilt-pattern squares that farmers in rural America hang on the sides of their barns. Quandahl and Cochran took that idea and made it three-dimensional and tactile. The quilt itself measures 9 feet by 16 feet and is made from quilt squares that Quandahl designed and constructed by hand, pulling materials from her own studio: leftover painting scraps, drop cloth, and colored vinyl. Cochran contributed illustrated muslin pieces featuring folk-style drawings, as well as wood-burned quilt tiles that add another layer of texture and craft to the whole thing.

What makes it stand out beyond its visuals is the way it pulls people in. The installation is interactive. Visitors can sit inside, pick up quilt-square puzzle pieces, and assemble their own designs. Cochran designed the wood-burned puzzle pieces, and Quandahl created a colored vinyl trifold key to help guide the activity. It’s the kind of participatory experience that makes you slow down and actually engage, rather than just snap a photo and move on, though you will absolutely want to snap a photo.

The two artists bring complementary practices to the table. Quandahl works primarily in painting, while Cochran takes a multimedia approach that frequently incorporates textiles and weaving. Their collaboration feels natural because of that balance, one thinking in structure and surface, the other in fiber and folk tradition. Together, they’ve created something that doesn’t feel like a design project as much as it feels like an invitation.

There’s also something quietly meaningful in the choice of a hoop house as the base form. Hoop houses are agricultural structures, tied to growing seasons and the cycle of land. By covering one in a quilt and placing it on a frozen lake in the middle of winter, Quandahl and Cochran are drawing a line between rest and care, between the quiet dormancy of cold months and the warmth of human hands making things. The installation celebrates rural craft traditions like quilting, embroidery, woodcarving, and wood burning, while highlighting the seasonal cycles of rest and care when the land is quiet. These are old skills finding renewed appreciation in contemporary art and design circles, and seeing them applied to a public installation on a frozen lake feels exactly right.

This is exactly the kind of project that reminds you why public art matters. It doesn’t ask anything complicated of you. It just shows up on a frozen lake, colorful and open, and invites you to come inside. That accessibility, that warmth in the middle of all that ice, is no accident. It’s the whole point. If you haven’t heard of Art Shanty Projects before now, consider this your introduction. And if you’re anywhere near Minneapolis this winter, there’s a patchwork hoop house on Lake Harriet waiting for you.

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A Wind-Powered Sculpture Is Lighting Up Tanzania’s Plains

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There’s something almost unsettling about a structure that appears to breathe. Not in a horror movie kind of way, but in that quiet, mesmerizing way that makes you stop, squint, and wonder if what you’re seeing is really happening. That’s exactly what Vincent Leroy’s Fractal Swarm does to people. It sits in the vast openness of the Tanzanian plains, and it moves. Not because of motors or hidden mechanisms, but because of the wind.

Leroy is a Paris-based French artist who grew up in rural Normandy tinkering with whatever he could get his hands on. That early habit of experimenting turned into a full-blown obsession with movement, which led him to study industrial design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris. By the time he graduated, he was already making kinetic work that galleries wanted to show. Since then, he has built a practice that sits comfortably between sculpture, installation art, and something that doesn’t quite have a name yet. His work has appeared everywhere from Parisian museums to Zanzibar’s shoreline, and the thread that runs through all of it is the same: movement as a material, not just as an effect.

Designer: Vincent Leroy

Fractal Swarm is his latest statement on that idea, and it might be the most ambitious one yet. The installation is built around the logic of fractal geometry, which is the kind of math that describes the way nature repeats itself at different scales. Think of the branching pattern of a tree, or the way a fern unfolds, or the texture of a coastline seen from above. Nature uses this structure constantly, and Leroy decided to make it visible in a landscape where that pattern is already everywhere.

The Tanzanian plains during the dry season are stripped down to essentials. Acacia trees stand with bare, branching silhouettes against the sky. The ground breaks into fragmented, textured patches of arid vegetation. Leroy’s installation mirrors all of that. Its branching configuration echoes the acacia silhouettes so closely that from a distance, it reads more like something that grew there than something that was built. That’s the point. Rather than imposing itself on the landscape, Fractal Swarm extends it.

What makes it come alive, literally, are the mirrored fins embedded within the structure’s modules. Thin and precisely placed, these fins catch and refract the intense light of the plains as they move. The wind sets everything in motion, and the fins respond by scattering light in constantly shifting patterns across the ground and the air around them. The result is something that changes every second depending on where you’re standing, what direction the wind is coming from, and what time of day it is. No two moments of looking at it are the same.

This is what Leroy keeps coming back to in his practice: the idea that slowing down and watching something move can completely change how you see it. His work tries to reveal the gaps that usually go unnoticed in today’s frenetic race for speed and performance. Fractal Swarm does that on a grand scale. It puts you in front of something enormous and quietly says: stand here. Watch this. Let the wind do something beautiful.

It’s also worth noting that Leroy isn’t new to working with wind in dramatic outdoor settings. His Drifting Cloud installation on Zanzibar’s east coast used rotating canvas discs that interacted directly with the shoreline’s breeze. Fractal Swarm takes that same sensibility deeper into the continent and scales it up into something more structural and mathematically precise.

What’s quietly radical about all of this is that Leroy uses some of the most rigorous abstract math available (fractal geometry) and turns it into something you feel before you think about it. You don’t need to understand the Mandelbrot set to be moved by Fractal Swarm. You just need to stand near it when the wind picks up and watch the plains light up like they’re waking. That’s the kind of art that sticks with you long after you’ve walked away.

The post A Wind-Powered Sculpture Is Lighting Up Tanzania’s Plains first appeared on Yanko Design.

When the Forest Sings Back: Human Perches in Quebec

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Picture yourself standing on a small platform in the middle of a Quebec forest, balancing on what feels like an oversized bird perch. The moment your weight settles, something magical happens. A bird call rings out, blending seamlessly into an ethereal soundtrack that seems to rise from the forest itself. Welcome to Human Perches, the latest installation from Montreal design studio Daily tous les jours that’s making us rethink how we experience nature.

Located at Chouette à voir!, a bird of prey sanctuary in St-Jude, Quebec, this permanent installation transforms a 55-meter elevated boardwalk into an interactive musical journey through the seasons. Ten aluminum perching stations punctuate the path, each one waiting for a human visitor to activate its hidden soundscape. The design is brilliantly simple: step onto a green perch, and you become part of the forest’s symphony.

Designer: Daily tous les jours

What makes this project so captivating is how it flips our usual relationship with wildlife. We’re used to being the noisy intruders, the reason birds fall silent when we approach. Here, we become the activators of sound. When humans aren’t present, the artwork stays quiet, mirroring the behavior of the sanctuary’s winged residents. It’s a poetic reversal that makes you acutely aware of your presence in the ecosystem.

The experience unfolds like a sonic story as you move along the boardwalk. Each perch represents a different season, with soundscapes that capture winter’s vigilance, spring’s courtship, summer’s protection, and autumn’s migration. The genius lies in the layering. Juno Award-winning composer Keiko Devaux crafted an evolving dialogue between abstract base compositions and actual bird calls from local species. Sometimes the bird voices appear as themselves. Other times, they’re transformed into ethereal textures or rhythmic elements that pulse beneath the surface.

Daily tous les jours, led by co-founders Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, has spent fifteen years creating participatory urban experiences, from musical swings to interactive light installations. But Human Perches marks a shift in their practice. Instead of focusing purely on human-to-human connection, they’re exploring the delicate interfaces between species. It’s part of a broader investigation into how sound vibrations can stimulate growth and communication within ecosystems, a thread that runs through their concurrent Forest Mixer project on Hornby Island as well.

The physical design is minimal but thoughtful. The aluminum perches create a striking contrast against the organic textures of the red cedar and spruce boardwalk, highlighting the intentionality of human presence in wild spaces. Each station includes sensors that detect when someone steps up, triggering both a soft light and the corresponding bird call. The act of perching itself becomes meaningful. You’re balancing, aware of your body, suspended between the marsh below and the forest canopy above. It demands a different kind of attention than simply walking through.

There’s an educational dimension here too. The sanctuary is home to various bird species, including vulnerable ones, and the installation serves as both attraction and conservation tool. “Conservation efforts to preserve our precious wildlife also involve education and enchantment,” Andraos explains. The project received significant support from Quebec’s Ministry of Culture and Communications, reflecting recognition that these kinds of immersive cultural experiences can reach audiences in unexpected ways.

What resonates most about Human Perches is how it heightens awareness without being preachy. You’re not being lectured about biodiversity or habitat loss. Instead, you’re invited to listen differently, to tune into layers of sound you might have walked past before. After experiencing the installation, visitors report hearing the forest with new ears, imagining the hidden life thrumming all around them even after they’ve left the perches behind.

In our increasingly screen-saturated world, projects like this offer something rare: a reason to be fully present in a physical space, to engage your whole body in the act of listening. It’s technology in service of slowness, design that creates space for wonder rather than distraction. The forest has always been singing. Daily tous les jours just gave us a way to finally hear it.

The post When the Forest Sings Back: Human Perches in Quebec first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Living Sphere: Japan’s Self-Contained Food Ecosystem Points to Urban Agriculture’s Future

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Perched at the Osaka Health Pavilion during Expo 2025, a translucent dome hums with life. Inside, tomatoes ripen above brackish water while pufferfish swim below, their waste feeding the plants that clean their home. This is “Inochi no Izumi,” or “Source of Life,” a 21-foot-high sphere that reimagines how cities might feed themselves. The dome’s genius lies in its vertical arrangement. Four water compartments form the base: seawater, brackish water, and two freshwater tanks. Each supports aquatic species matched to its salinity, from marine groupers to freshwater sturgeon. Above each tank rises a corresponding tier of hydroponic crops, creating four parallel ecosystems stacked inside a single structure.

The nutrient cycle starts underwater. Fish excrete ammonia-rich waste that specialized microbes convert into nitrites, then nitrates. Pumps lift this nutrient-loaded water to feed the plants directly overhead. As roots absorb nitrogen compounds, they return purified water to the tanks below. Nothing leaves the system. Nature’s wetland cycling becomes an engine for food production. The broader the range of compatible species, the more resilient and self-sufficient the ecosystem becomes. That diversity mirrors natural systems but remains optimized for human consumption.

Designer: VikingDome, Osaka Metropolitan University’s Plant Factory R&D Center & Tokyo University of Marine Science & Technology

Each layer hosts plants suited to its water source. Salt-tolerant halophytes like sea asparagus and sea purslane grow above the seawater tank housing red seabream and black porgy. Sea grapes flourish in the saltwater itself. Move up a tier, and semi-tolerant tomatoes thrive on brackish water where Japanese pufferfish and ornamental carp glide. The freshwater zones support functional vegetables—nutrient-dense herbs and lettuces—while edible flowers, including nasturtium and marigold crown the top tier, their beds rotating via built-in motors to optimize light exposure.

The dome’s outer skin consists of transparent ETFE panels stretched across 245 steel structural bars connected by 76 joints. This geodesic framework, built using VikingDome’s T-STAR system, covers 1,378 square feet while weighing just over two tons. The entire structure arrived at Yumeshima Island on three pallets. Its design maximizes sunlight penetration while maintaining stable internal temperatures, creating a microclimate where multiple growing zones coexist.

Developed with Osaka Metropolitan University’s Plant Factory R&D Center and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, this system demonstrates agricultural biodiversity at work. The practical applications extend beyond exhibition. Dense urban centers with limited ground space could host these modular systems on rooftops or in narrow lots. Land-poor regions where traditional farming struggles could gain food independence. Disaster-prone areas might deploy closed-loop domes for decentralized production unaffected by soil contamination or water scarcity.

What makes Source of Life compelling isn’t revolutionary technology. The core principle—aquaponics—has existed for decades. Rather, it’s the elegant integration of ecological understanding with space-efficient design. Commercial agriculture often chases yield through inputs: fertilizers, pesticides, energy. This dome inverts that logic, asking what happens when we design with nature’s cycles instead of against them. As cities grow and climate pressures mount, feeding urban populations sustainably demands fresh thinking. This geodesic greenhouse suggests one path forward: upward, inward, and circular.

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A Ring of Light: Ancient Symbols Meet Modern Art at Giza

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Picture this: you’re standing on the Giza Plateau, the Great Pyramids towering behind you as they have for 4,500 years, and suddenly there’s something new in this ancient landscape. A massive aluminum ring that looks like it fell from the future, catching sunlight and throwing it back at history itself. That’s exactly what Turkish artist Mert Ege Köse just dropped on us with “The Shen,” and honestly, it’s the kind of art installation that makes you stop scrolling and actually want to book a flight to Egypt.

“The Shen” is currently on display as part of Art D’Égypte’s “Forever Is Now” exhibition, now in its fifth edition, and it’s doing something really special with how we think about contemporary art in historical spaces. The sculpture isn’t trying to compete with the pyramids or overshadow them. Instead, it creates this incredible dialogue between ancient Egyptian symbolism and modern design sensibility.

Designer: Mert Ege Köse

The name itself is a clue to what Köse is up to. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Shen symbol represented eternity and protection, depicted as a circle of rope with no beginning or end. It’s basically the OG infinity symbol, showing up in royal cartouches and religious texts throughout pharaonic history. Köse took that concept and supersized it into a monumental aluminum structure that frames the pyramids like the world’s most epic viewfinder.

What makes this work so compelling is how it plays with reflection and perception. The polished aluminum surface doesn’t just sit there looking pretty. It actively engages with its surroundings, capturing the shifting desert light, the blue Egyptian sky, and the ancient stones in a constantly changing display. Depending on where you stand and what time of day you visit, you’re basically looking at a different artwork. It’s responsive design taken to a literal, sculptural extreme.

Köse has built his practice around creating these kinds of sculptural works that bridge tradition and innovation. His pieces typically feature smooth surfaces and malleable aluminum alloys, materials that feel distinctly contemporary while still carrying a sense of timelessness. There’s a poetic quality to his work that doesn’t hit you over the head with meaning but instead invites you to find your own connections.

The location matters enormously here. Art D’Égypte has been pushing boundaries with “Forever Is Now” since 2021, transforming the Giza Plateau into an open-air gallery where contemporary artists from around the world respond to one of humanity’s most iconic historical sites. It’s not just about plunking modern art next to ancient wonders for the shock value. The exhibition carefully considers how contemporary creative practice can illuminate and honor historical context rather than clash with it.

“The Shen” succeeds because it understands this balance. The circular form echoes not just the ancient Egyptian symbol but also the eternal cycle that the pyramids themselves represent: life, death, and the continuity of human creative expression across millennia. When you look through the ring toward the pyramids, you’re literally framing history through a contemporary lens. It’s a visual metaphor that works on multiple levels without feeling forced or pretentious.

There’s also something to be said about accessibility here. Unlike a lot of monumental sculpture that feels designed for art world insiders, “The Shen” is immediately photographable and shareable. It gives visitors a way to interact with both the artwork and the pyramids in a fresh way. In our current moment where experience and documentation are so intertwined, that matters. The sculpture becomes a portal, not just literally but also digitally, connecting people worldwide to this ancient site through contemporary art.

As an emerging voice in Turkish contemporary art, Köse is making moves that position him well beyond regional recognition. Bringing “The Shen” to Egypt, working at this scale, and creating something that genuinely enhances one of the world’s most significant historical sites is the kind of project that defines careers. What “The Shen” ultimately offers is something increasingly rare: art that makes you feel something without requiring an art history degree to understand it. It’s beautiful, it’s thoughtful, and it reminds us that the conversation between past and present doesn’t have to be complicated to be profound. Sometimes all you need is a perfect circle of light.

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Clam-shaped kinetic sound sculptures sing of the quality of water

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We’ve thankfully become more aware of the quality of our waters, especially with the increase of pollution or drastic changes in the chemical composition of rivers, lakes, and seas. We now have sophisticated equipment and software to monitor such properties, but it might come as a surprise that Mother Nature has her own way of detecting abnormalities in water. Clams, known as nature’s filter feeders, immediately react to sudden changes in water quality, sometimes even faster than scientific equipment.

Taking inspiration from one of nature’s wonder workers, this art installation turns water quality from an incorporeal idea into a tangible representation. Rather than just clamming up, these kinetic sculptures create an eerie melody, as if giving voice to the pain and woes of the water. It creates a surreal yet beautiful manifestation of water quality in a way that you can see and hear beyond just figures and graphs.

Designer: Marco Barotti

Clams aren’t able to filter out toxins (which they turn into pearls), so they would immediately shut close when they detect pollution in the water. Their reaction is sometimes faster than sensors and computers that still have to analyze the data from water samples, though, of course, they won’t be as accurate or specific. This interesting behavior, however, became the inspiration for this kinetic sculpture that, rather than just detecting water quality, translates the data into something just as interesting.

“Clams” is a collection of, well, translucent clam-like objects that have speakers inside. The clams are connected to a sensor that tests the quality of the water in the only way that humans can. Changes in the water quality are translated into sounds that shift over time, creating the semblance of eerie music. The vibrations from the speaker also cause the clamshell to go up and down, making it look like the clams are singing.

The shells themselves are made from recycled waste plastic, adding to the sustainability message of the sculptures. Although the shape of these man-made clams is quite simple, the otherworldly soundscape it produces is quite unique and memorable. It also creates an interesting bridge between media art, data sonification, and environmental awareness, translating intangible concepts and figures into something humans can better appreciate and understand.

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The Eye-Catching Lighting Installation Is A Dazzling Fusion Of Innovation and Minimalism

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At the last Euroluce show in Milan, the Liiu lamp by Vantot, edited by Luceplan, captured attention for its striking design. Liiu is a suspended structure with thin conductive wires that support small LED lamps. These lamps are held in place by springs that adjust their height, giving the entire piece a clean, minimalist appearance. It has since been recognized as an iconic piece, praised for its distinctive and innovative design.

Designer: Vantot, edited by Luceplan

Creating an iconic lamp is no small feat in the saturated market, and Liiu has managed to achieve this status by balancing aesthetics with functionality. Its design is both decorative and functional, drawing interest with its unique form and construction. The lamp’s instantly recognizable structure, coupled with its innovative use of conductive materials, sets it apart from more traditional lighting designs.

Vantot, known for its boundary-pushing approach to lighting design, avoids conventional methods in favor of more experimental techniques. The studio’s portfolio reflects this innovative spirit, with each lamp designed around the way light behaves and interacts with its environment, rather than merely focusing on creating a beautiful lampshade. The complexity of lighting design goes beyond what is typically considered in other design objects, requiring careful attention to both the construction and the behavior of light.

Two of Vantot’s other notable designs, the V-V-V and O-O-O lamps, exemplify the studio’s approach. The V-V-V lamp features a thin metal structure suspended by wires that also conduct electricity. This eliminates the need for traditional power cords, creating a sleek and modern design that serves both decorative and functional purposes. Its fishbone-shaped metal frame holds three LED lights, which diffuse light horizontally, making it an art piece as much as a lighting fixture.

On the other hand, the O-O-O lamp provides a different kind of lighting experience. While it uses similar conductive materials, its design is intended to provide subtle, ambient lighting. The glass lampshade directs light vertically, diffusing it gently throughout the room. The modular construction allows for customization in both the size and frequency of the lighting elements, making it adaptable to various spaces and user preferences.

Both lamps, along with Liiu, illustrate how Vantot explores new possibilities in lighting design, leveraging contemporary LED technology. LEDs operate at much lower voltages than traditional lighting, allowing for more creative flexibility in how electricity is conducted through the structure. This opens up new ways of integrating lighting into interior spaces safely, without the need for bulky or dangerous power cords.

The Liiu lamp, in particular, stands out for its elegant simplicity, combining function and form in a seamless design. Vantot’s attention to detail ensures that every element of the lamp, from its height-adjusting springs to the conductive wires, is carefully considered and tested. The studio’s approach to research and development means that each product undergoes extensive testing and refinement before reaching the market, ensuring that both aesthetics and performance are optimized.

In addition to their individual products, Vantot also creates large-scale lighting installations that showcase the full potential of their designs. These installations are often sculptural in nature, blending art with functional lighting in a way that enhances the surrounding environment. The Liiu lamp itself originated as one such installation before being adapted for commercial production.

Vantot’s work highlights the importance of innovation in lighting design, focusing on how light is emitted and managed rather than simply how the lamp looks. With Liiu, V-V-V, O-O-O, and other designs, the studio demonstrates that lighting can be more than just a source of illumination—it can be an emotional and immersive experience, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in contemporary design.

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Exploring The Best Of London Design Festival 2024: Top 5 Exhibits You Can’t Miss

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This year we got a chance to experience the London Design Festival! Currently, in its 22nd edition, the festival takes place on 14-22 September in London. It celebrates London as a design capital of the world while presenting a series of exhibitions and installations that explore design through different mediums such as light, materials, sounds, and more. Designers and creators from around the world showcased dynamic and fluid installations such as ‘Light in Motion’, where light was explored, or the Materials Matter fair where the importance of materials, and how they impact us was focused upon. We’ve picked out the Top 5 installations and designs from the London Design Festival that we loved experiencing. We hope you love them too!

1. Light In Motion by Acrylicize

This stunning inaugural exhibition by Acrylicize is called ‘Light in Motion’ and it is running at the London Design Festival this year. It celebrates the fluid and dynamic interplay of light and form, diving deep into its bond with space, time, and movement. Twelve artists, designers, and engineers showcased their work, manipulating light to adopt a sculptural form, allowing it to move across walls and rejuvenate spaces. The displayed works are an effort to bring focus on the quality of light, and how it can be moved and perceived. “Each practitioner has approached light and motion from a unique perspective and with a different relationship to time. Yet there is a sense of continuity between the works,” said the curators.

The installation ‘10,000 Tiny Suns’ by Generative Optics experiments with light as a medium and subject. It includes an intricate and impressive assembly of compound lenses, interconnected through a fibrous framework, which ushers and manipulates the path of light. It is made using advanced 3D-printed lenses, caustics, and algorithms. Designed by Relative Distance, a London-based studio, Phase is a long-form timepiece that showcases the details of the moon’s surface, via an artful use of light and glass. The surreal installation replicates natural moonlight, forming a unique and immersive experience.

2. Design You Can Feel by ASUS

ASUS’s Design You Can Feel Exhibition is open to the public till 22nd September, and it is one to check out. Centered around the material ‘Ceraluminim’, which was used by ASUS to develop its Zenbook laptops, the exhibit explores not only this material but also intricate topics such as craftsmanship and artificial intelligence. Ceralumin boasts a light and durable tactility, merging the qualities of both aluminum and ceramics, making it a one-of-a-kind material with a surreal nature-inspired aesthetic. Six product and industrial design studios were selected to express the various qualities of Ceralumin through furniture, lighting, and installation design.

British designer Giles Miller built a stunning floor-to-ceiling sensory installation comprising 1800 pieces. Thick timber petals were positioned astonishingly and artfully, allowing them to rotate, and resulting in seamless rhythmic patterns. South Korean design studio Niceworkshop created the Aluminum Formwork (AL-FORM) series – a collection of solid seating and tables built from old skyscraper formwork. The collection’s lounge chair was ceramized by ASUS, making it one of the first products to feature Ceralumin, besides the Zenbook laptops.

3. SPECTRUM by 2LG Studio

Jordan Cluroe and Russell Whitehead teamed up to form the 2LG studio, and this year they’re completing 10 years of collaboration. To celebrate their years of creation and innovation together, they partnered up with the London-based hotel Hart Shoreditch to present the immersive exhibition ‘SPECTRUM’. Through Spectrum they are creating a sensory journey within the hotel, setting up a series of vibrant and colorful interventions. They are “exploring human and personal connections to color, evoking memories and inviting conversations.”

The hotel is based on a theme of ‘joyful minimalism’, and various products have been reimagined intriguingly and colorfully. The creations include a reincarnation of a rug by Floor Story in the form of a large-scale moiré using AI filters in a rainbow spectrum. Other pieces involve an eight-minute soundscape written with the composer Quentin LaChapele and a wraparound video piece by digital artist Lucy Hardcastle.

4. Material Matters

50 acclaimed brands, designers, makers, and organizations have contributed to creating the Material Matters fair on the iconic Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf on London’s Southbank. The fair attempts to celebrate the significance of materials, and the myriad ways in which they shape and affect our lives. It includes five floors flooded with products, installations, curated exhibitor spaces, and an extensive talks program too. It dwells deeply into how the design world can address problems regarding the circular economy, and how material intelligence makes a difference to our lives.

The FIBER FUTURES exhibition showcases eight different approaches to alternative resource streams, innovative spinning techniques, and bio-manufacturing, as well as opening up new pathways for real change. It is led by Adidas AG and RWTH Aachen University. The Locally Grown installation is an interactive one, and it explores hair as a new material, highlighting its great potential. Led by Studio Sanne Visser, this project focuses on the development of human hair as a super-scale regenerative material.

5. Pavilions of Wonder by Nina Tolstrup

Nina Tolstrup designed and set up three immersive pavilions on the Strand as a part of the London Design Festival. The impressive structures are inspired by Barbie Dreamhouses and Palm Springs’ mid-century modern architecture. She teamed up with Barbie creators Mattel and the tourism agency Visit Greater Palm Springs to bring the installation to life. Named the Pavilions of Wonder, the pavilions are a tribute to the whimsical and vibrant design of Barbie’s Dreamhouse, while nudging at the desert modernism of Palm Spring’s architectural style.

The Playful Pauses Pavilion is inspired by the Palm Springs City Hall and Tramway Gas Station. The gas station was taken as a source of inspiration for previous Barbie Dreamhouses as well. It features a simple metal grid, and a pointed roof, accentuated by kaleidoscopic circles which have been crafted from painted drainage tubes. The Design Stories Pavilion is made from CNC-cut plywood connected by a metal scaffold grid system that can be disassembled when needed. The structure merges the design philosophy of straight swimming pools with the geometric signage typically seen in Palm Springs.

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Mesmerizing Paired Cubes and its 3,500 polycarbonate panels invites viewers to play

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It’s always interesting and nice to see installations that are not just works of art but also invite the viewer to interact with it. Sure, paintings and sculptures in museums are nice to look at but of course you’re not allowed to touch them for important reasons. So art installations are much more accessible and in a sense, more experimental, especially if visitors are invited to touch and explore it.

Designer: A+U Lab

Paired Cubes is a temporary pavilion that is set up in Busan, South Korea but is also created to be transferred and assembled in other public spaces. It is made up of 3,500 recycled polycarbonate panels put together in 2.5m tall pavilions and put together without any fittings or glue. It has eight outer facades and two inner walls and the overall effect, especially when illuminated, is that they look like floating panels.

Aside from its sustainability, the pavilion is also pretty interactive as visitors are actually invited to interact with the structure and its visual patterns and optical textures. They are put together in both a symmetrical and asymmetrical fashion. During the day, you can explore the layered surfaces that bring about various shadowy patterns. When it becomes darker, it becomes a luminous box which attracts you to go inside the pavilion.

Up to 6 people can go inside the structure at once but you can also just stay outside to play around with the panels. It is also built to be easily disassembled, transported, and reassembled so we can expect to see this pop up in other areas after this.

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