Hasta La Ideas

London Design Festival: Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, Jasper Morrison and AL_A are among the designers who have created benches with British design brand Established & Sons for the central courtyard of the V&A museum (+slideshow).

Each of the one-off benches is made from a different material and produced in collaboration with a company specialising in that material. After being on display for the festival they’ll be auctioned off and the money fed back to fund next year’s London Design Festival commissions.

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, the designers of the Olympic torch, made a marble bench with holes bored through (above) in collaboration with Italian studio Tor Art. They were inspired by shrapnel marks left in the V&A museum’s western facade after the Second World War. “It’s something that always fascinated me and Ed on the way from South Kensington tube up to the Royal College when we were students, and so when this project came up we thought it was a nice way to reference that,” explained Jay Osgerby at the opening.

AL_A, the architecture practice led by Amanda Levete, worked with Barcelona ceramics company Ceramica Cumella to come up with a bench (above) made of overlapping tiles, glazed with colours inspired by the museum’s ceramics collections. AL_A is also designing a new subterranean gallery for the museum.

British designer Alexander Taylor made a bench from mirror-polished stainless steel cylinders (above) with steel specialists Caparo. He explained that making perfect cylinders in steel is tricky because “the material is extruded with an oval profile so it has to be cut and put back together again.”

Italian designer Martino Gamper built a wooden bench (above) from slanted planks of thermally modified hardwood, treated to improve its stability and resistance to decay. The angled stripes of red oak, maple, ash, yellow birch and tulipwood provided by the American Hardwood Export Council create an “optical illusion” and “somehow give the impression of animation” said Gamper, adding that the modular system can be extended to any length.

British designer Jasper Morrison collaborated with concrete specialists lowinfo to create a concrete bench (above) with narrow runnels along the seat that allow rain water to drain away despite the seat being curved for comfort, while German designer Konstantin Grcic worked with Italian company Bisazza on a glass mosaic bench (below).

Portugese designer Fernando Brizio created a cork bench in the shape of a pig’s foot (below) with Amorim Cork.

British designer Felix de Pass produced a cream-coloured sheet-steel bench (below) with perforations that help water drain away and disperse heat from the sun. It’s an adaptation of his bench that’s already in production with Established & Sons.

Sam Hecht and Kim Colin from Industrial Facility worked with Corian, a material often used for kitchen worktops, to create two benches (below) that mimic the marble plinths found inside the museum.

Sadly the final bench in the collection, created by Italian designer Luca Nichetto and glass manufacturer Nardo Vetro, was broken in transit.

Other installations at the V&A during the London Design Festival include Keiichi Matsuda’s data visualisation and chairs by Nendo scattered around the museum.

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London Design Festival: every scrap of material and minute of production time was carefully recorded during the manufacturing of these twelve wooden chairs, helping the Royal College of Art students that designed them to measure each one’s sustainability.

Above: Floating Chair by Bobby Petersen and Tom Gottelier
Top: Well Proven Chair by James Shaw and Marjan van Aubel 

The data was used to produce life-cycle assessments, charting the projected lifespan of each chair against the cost of resources and processes needed to produce it.

Above: Travelling Bench by Nicholas Gardner and David Horan

The entire collection was manufactured from different hardwoods and includes a flatpack bench (above), a stool held together with string (below) and a one-man boat.

Above: Snelson by Sam Weller

The Well Proven Chair (top) is formed from timber shavings mixed with bio-resin, which together form a sloppy paste that hardens as it dries.

Above: Folded Chair by Norie Matsumoto

The Folded Chair (above) has an asymmetric structure that collapses for easy storage, while the Solitude chair (below) has solid sides and was inspired by church seating in Cyprus.

Above: Solitude by Mary Argyrou

Santi Guerrero Font used a strong ash to create his chair (below) so that he could slim down the thickness from 20 millimetres to 12.

Above: Num. 4 by Santi Guerrero Font

Lauren Davies produced her high-back chair (below) using offcuts from nine different types of wood, while Michael Warren created his stool (below that) from a single piece of timber.

Above: Leftovers Chair by Lauren Davies

The students worked with manufacturer Benchmark to build the chairs and were supervised by tutors Sebastian Wrong and Harry Richardson.

Above: Designed Legacy by Michael Warren

Commissioned by the American Hardwood Export Council, the collection was exhibited at the V&A museum, as part of the London Design Festival.

Above: Squeeze by Nicholas Wallenberg

Twelve writers have also penned stories and poems imagining the life story of each chair, which are presented together as a book with photographs by Petr Krejčí.

Above: Beeeench by Petter Thörne

See all our stories from the London Design Festival »

Above: Tree Furniture by Anton Alvarez

Here’s some more text from the exhibition organisers:

An innovative collaboration between the American Hardwood Export Council and the Royal College of Art Design Products programme offers a fascinating approach to working with an age-old material – American hardwood.

Out of the Woods explores the creative and environmental potential of this naturally renewable material by looking at the entire life cycle of each product. Working with British furniture producer Benchmark, internationally renowned for its craftsmanship in wood, RCA students – under tutors Sebastian Wrong (Established & Sons) and Harry Richardson (Committee) – have each designed a chair or seat using American Hardwood.

The production was carefully monitored with the help of sustainability experts, p.e. international, to prepare an accurate life cycle impact report for each chair. The reports contribute to AHEC’s on-going research into hardwood’s sustainability credentials and inform the students of the full cradle-to-grave environmental impact of their design and material choices. Inspired by the life cycle of each chair, twelve well known writers have created a work of art to tell the story: Adventures of Twelve hardwood Chairs.

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at the V&A appeared first on Dezeen.

News: online homeware retailer Made.com has opened a physical showroom on the ninth floor of a west London office tower, featuring QR codes and miniature 3D-printed models of furniture.

The 400 square metre Ninth Floor Showroom, located next to the company’s offices in Notting Hill, presents a changing selection of the site’s most popular furniture and lighting products arranged “like a studio shoot”.

Visitors can scan QR codes to find out more about products, play with miniature furniture models and take home postcards and fabric samples.

“Furniture and design is a special category in the sense that the products take up a lot of space,” said Made.com CEO and founder Ning Li. “Our business model tries to eliminate every unnecessary cost, like agents, importers, brands and warehousing, including the physical stores. Whenever you have a lot of costs, you can’t pass on the savings.”

Li says the future for Made.com is a “convergence of online and offline”, using the showroom to improve the online retail experience. “It’s very experimental. It’s not something that can replace physical retail, but it’s a good step to bridge the gap,” he said.

Made.com isn’t the only company to attempt to move from online into offline retail recently. ”We’ve seen over the last year, especially at Christmas, companies like eBay doing pop-up stores or experiential stores in a physical space,” Li said. “We hope to see more [companies] doing similar things, because it makes a lot of sense for consumers.”

Former investment banker Li launched Made.com in 2010 with backing from Brent Hoberman, founder of furniture and homeware website MyDeco and holiday shop Lastminute.com. Made.com now employs 70 people and ships several containers of goods to UK customers every day.

The showroom opened last week during the London Design Festival and is open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday at Newcombe House, 45 Notting Hill Gate, W11 3LQ.

Earlier today we reported that online design retailer Fab.com is to merge its UK and German sites into a single European store.

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London Design Festival: construction workers made this furniture on show at London’s Gallery Fumi, but Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27 has added small details to embellish each piece.

The collection was produced in collaboration with Italian architects Manuela Verga and Paolo Boatti, and includes tables, stools, shelves, an iPod dock and an umbrella stand.

Workers created the furniture using found materials on the construction sites of some of Kogan’s buildings and the architects have added details that include gold-plated strips and nails, mosaic tiles and a marble shelf.

An enamel-coated drawer transforms a side table into a jewellery stand, while a bright orange lamp turns another into a bedside table.

Vases are set into the wooden surfaces of some of the tables and one features an attached copper lamp.

Past projects shown at Gallery Fumi include furniture made from wooden dowels and an installation inspired by corn.

See all our stories about Gallery Fumi »

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Here’s some more information from Gallery FUMI:

For the London Design Festival 2012 Gallery FUMI proudly presents Prostheses and Innesti by architect Marcio Kogan + Studio MK27, Manuela Verga and Paolo Boatti.

Prostheses and Innesti is a collection of works initially created by construction workers of Kogan’s building sites and then reinterpreted with gentle interventions by the Brazilian architect and his Studio MK27.

Born out of various necessities these pieces have been created with materials available at the sites.

Kogan, mindful of the wealth of the ingenuity displayed in these anonymously constructed works, has modified and added elements to these pieces.

These interventions to the original pieces evoke an effect of contrasts and offer new meanings and materiality, prolonging the lifespan and creating a new context open to new perceptions.

FUMI will show the entire collection produced to date which spans 4 years including brand new works; the ‘Made in Italy’ collection.

These new pieces are produced in collaboration with two Italian architects, Manuela Verga and Paolo Boatti, who personally supervised the restoration works on the fifteenth century castle of Vigevano, Italy.

The Italian collection has been entirely conceived and developed in Milan.

The aim of the project is to represent the excellence of the workmanship and raw materials of the ‘Made in Italy’ brand, such as: the Murano glass, the travertine marble and the silk from the Lake of Como.

In this collection the creativity of the Italian and Brazilian architects is combined with the ‘accidental design’ discovered on the building sites.

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Manuela Verga and Paolo Boatti appeared first on Dezeen.

Contemporary contract furniture designer and manufacturer, Isomi, will launch the Mono Collection at 100% Design in London this September, made with t..