Saturday marked the opening of 2014's London Design Festival, a nine-day celebration of international art and architecture. It's essentially an urban playground for designers who get to do things like take "masterclasses in leathership" and watch illustrators work inside an Anthropologie store window. All of these things are more interesting than what British starchitect Zaha Hadid has contributed to the fest: an aluminum (sorry aluminium) arch over the courtyard pool of the city's V&A Museum. Her Crest, described by T Magazine as a "swooping creation" that "will straddle and reflect" the pool, has a lot of people spouting poetics. Dezeen writes "the museum's 19th-century red brick building is mirrored on the surface, while the colours in turn are reflected on the underside of the bridge-like structure." None, though, are more impressed with the hifalutin, intellectually rigorous nature of an curve than the people who commissioned it, who say it is "experimental and pushes the boundaries of a construction technique." Yeah, OK.
Hadid, whose love for all things colorless and curving has reverberated across the planet, is not the only creative who's installed a piece for the festival. According to T, this year's week o' design features a "series of installations" that "provoke onlookers to reexamine their surroundings." Included: two aluminum fins suspended above visitor's heads, which designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby describe as like "a chicken on a spit" (???) and an Airbnb-sponsored pop-up called "A Place Called Home," where designers Jasper Morrison and Ilse Crawford craft interiors that represent their domestic ideal. Viva la obscure, expensive design-y thing!
· Zaha Hadid Installs Aluminium Wave Over Pool in V&A Museum Garden [Dezeen]
· A Complete Guide to This Year's London Design Festival [T Magazine]
· London Design Festival Events [official site]
· All Zaha Hadid coverage [Curbed National]
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