The London Design Festival grows from strength to strength every year and is now probably at its optimum size as it is at the point where a visitor to London would find it impossible to do everything. Looking beyond the showcase exhibition areas, where the national stands, as in previous years, are the best, […]
Imaginative, zany, innovative, fun design is alive and well across Europe. Thank goodness the graduates from the best design schools across the continent continue to challenge and innovate. We need this if the UK and Europe are going to continue to maintain their reputation for high quality design, at a time when some governments (ie […]
Gallery FUMI loves to surprise with new innovative furniture where designers cleverly used science and art to transform unexpected materials such as glass, lead or expanded polystyrene into something new and perhaps apparently impossible, like contemporary seats, tables, lights and benches. French designer Thomas Lemut has created solidity from transparency with GLASS MEKANO in which […]
Three cheers for Francesco Vezzoli for bringing the colour, theatre and heat of Italy into Nahmad Project’s gallery space in the heart of cold grey autumnal London. Goodbye to the ubiquitous white walls and stone, concrete or timber floors of most art galleries. For three months, works by Vezzoli and Giorgio de Chirico will be […]
Gilbert and George were young once! Though they were born in the early 40′s, we are so used to their recent work that it is a surprise to see the artists as young men in their early 30′s as they walk through verdant landscapes describing in drawings and narative a day in their lives from […]
The forward-thinking directors of Spode established the Spode Museum Trust as an independent charity in 1987, into which it placed the Spode collection and archive, a unique piece of England’s history covering two centuries, including 40,000 ceramic items and 25,000 engraved plates from which the transfers were made. Spode itself ceased trading as an independent […]
French artist Daniel Buran (born 1938) has filled the ground floor of the Lisson Gallery in Lisson Street in London with his installation “PILE UP: High Reliefs. Situated Works”. Brightly coloured, different arrangements of bold, three-dimensional shapes, with his trademark stripes, are set on vertical mirrors that change in perspective as the viewer walks around […]
Remember those old black and white photographs of art galleries with the rooms full of potted palms and little chairs on which well-dressed ladies could sit and chat; with similarities to the glass houses at botanical gardens where white classical sculptures were interspersed among the palm trees? All that was missing was the palm court […]
100% Design at Olympia has grown in size, but, in doing so, it seems to have lost the focus and the innovative edge it had when it started. Today the fair ranges from high technology with virtual reality to hand-made bricks and medieval timber interiors. Perhaps there are now too many of these shows […]
Surrounded by historic tapestries, Ross Lovegrove’s immense serpent ripples through the gallery, its design inspired by the fabrics of the ladies in the medieval tapestries around it. A short walk away is the colourful stage design by Es Devlin for George Bizet’s opera Carmen to be performed on a stage in the lake at the […]
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
(Thomas Moore)
To be an architect means having a wide range of interests - architecture, art and creativity in all its variety of forms, sustainability, science and innovation. The greatest interest is often where these different worlds overlap and collide - that is when something imaginative often occurs that pushes us all forward to another place
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