Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival 2011: Czech designer Maxim Velčovský presents a series of containers made from semi-finished iron piping at Mint in London.

The Local Collection comprises pieces of piping that have been diverted from their intended life as part of the city’s plumbing network and joined together to make vases.

The series was on show as part of and exhibition called Mint Explorers at the west London shop as part of the London Design Festival and the exhibition continues until 30 September. See all our stories about the London Design Festival here.

This time last year Velčovský showed a series of objects covered in mineral deposits at Mint – check them out in our earlier story and watch an interview we recorded at his Prague studio here.

Parisian studio Ciguë recently furnished a cosmetics shop with pieces of diverted plumbing – take a look at it here.

Photographs are by Jara Moravec.

Here’s some more information from Maxim Velčovský:

Local Collection

The Local collection is inspired by local identities. Quite recently the oldest porcelain workshop in the Czech Republic got closed.

I reacted by going to the local ironmonger’s shop. In the global era I started working with the stuff you can find in your neighbourhood. The material and the subsequent process in the context of place and time is what make the design really authentic.

The semi-finished products for the production of piping became my building material for the new collection. In the ironmonger’s I have always been fascinated by the parts whose morphology anticipated a function of the object.

The Local Collection makes use of the morphology of parts displayed in anonymous wholesale metal shops. I see these warehouses as boxes with Lego bricks without the original instructions that got lost. Now we can only use our own imagination.

See also:

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Story cabinet by Maxim Velčovský	Underground Souvenirs by Maxim Velčovský	Interview with Maxim Velčovský