Victoria And Albert Museum | The Blogazine - Contemporary Lifestyle Magazine

17/09/2013

3D Printed Gun and the Ethic of Design Production

When last year an essay published in The Economist described the evolution of 3D printers as the beginning of the third industrial revolution, most designers were already thinking about how this technology might be formally exploited. Hence, a myriad of 3D printed furniture marched out, displaying all the wonderful stylistic and formal quirks allowed by this production technique. The second issue soon discussed in design circles concerned the economic value of the new technology and how design objects would be bought and consumed in the near future. From tiny do-it-yourself 3D printers that allowed you to produce anything you wanted at your house to online projects like OpenDesk that store technical drawings for neat chairs, tables and shelves, design world seemed concerned about how far our imagination might go in coming up with objects we would be able to produce at home.

But last week’s acquisition by Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows deeper implications of these new means of production. As part of their Design Fund acquisition, the curators of the museum have decided to add a 3D printed gun to their collection. In fact, in comparison to The Liberator gun, other objects added to the collection this year – which include Formafantasma‘s Botanica collection, The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, Ear Chairs by Studio Makking & Bey and the George chest of drawers by Gareth Neal – seem innocuous and almost dull.

The Liberator gun was developed and assembled earlier this year by Cody Wilson, a Texas-based law student, through the use of separate printed components entirely made of ABS plastic, with the exception of a metal nail used as a firing pin. While the technical drawings of the project were taken off the internet, The Liberator project nevertheless poses urgent moral and ethical questions about the use of technology in everyday life. In fact, Kieran Long, V&A’s senior curator discusses that “so far people have focused on the ability to print out things at home, such as toys, but this seems to be only part of it. In my view, the gun blew all that away. It showed the fuller implications of the dissemination of the means of production. Everybody is now potentially a manufacturer.” And while the ability to design, produce and build objects by ourselves appears liberating, hopefully this project will show the design world it should finally start being more concerned about issues that go far, far beyond the poetics of form, colour and structure.

Rujana Rebernjak

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04/09/2013

Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s

In 2013 fashion exhibitions seem to focus much on celebrating the eternal, never-ending inspirational link between style and music. After MET hosted Punk: Chaos to Couture, Victoria and Albert Museum of London launched, in July, Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s.

Through more than eighty-five outfits, the aim of the show is to perform the exiting world of the historical clubs of the city, by making the viewer conscious of how they have deeply influenced the designers of the time – as well as all those people involved in the fashion field.

Among the others, you’ll find pieces from Betty Jackson, John Galliano and Georgina Godley who, talking about the exhibit, said: “Young London was all about taking risks and creating something out of nothing through passion and ambition”. Club to Catwalk traces the creative link between music, club and catwalk, by analyzing a special decade that consecrated London as the capital of eclecticism.

The exhibition runs until February 16th and the side events are many, like the one on Friday 6 September: a special talk for celebrating the thirty years of Paul Bernstock and Thelma Speirs, whose anarchic hats have always been worn by celebrities. From the museum’s website you’ll find the full events calendar.

Francesca Crippa

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27/08/2013

Design to See in September: London Design Festival

If you have enjoyed your summer holidays as much as we have, you must be really cranky for heading back to your office. For this very reason, we have come up with the perfect strategy to face those difficult first days at work: planning your next trip. If you’re a design junkie, there is no better place to be this September than London. In fact, for the eleventh year in a row, London will be hosting its Design Festival, and even though it may be a bit too soon to know all the great shows, shops, new products and brands to visit, here is a brief guide to this year’s edition.

The main venue of the Festival, which this year bears the slogan “Design is Everywhere”, is hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum. V&A’s rich collection is the perfect setting for creating connections and reflecting on design practice. At the intersection between centuries-old crafts and up-to-date design, the V&A will be hosting different initiatives, from a real-life installation with objects from its collection designed by Scholten and Baijings, to Swarovski “God is in the details project” which will offer a closer look (literally) at the museum’s collection.

As with any other fair or international event, London Design Week has given birth to a set of collateral events, mainly organized in design districts around town. Even though Brompton Design District is the oldest cluster, nevertheless Eastern London has lately been true hub of creative activity. Hence, Clerkenwell Design Quarter with its retail spaces and Shoreditch Design Triangle with design studios and young creatives are the ones that need your attention.

Last but not least, we feel the need to mention in a concise to-see some events that have already been put on our design calendar for this year’s Festival: Max Lamb and his terrazzo project developed for dzek, Wrong for Hay collection directed by Sebastian Wrong for the super-exciting Danish brand Hay, Graphic Africa at Habitat‘s Platform gallery, and, of course, two days of talks at Global Design Forum at the V&A.

p.s. Even though we are still sleepy from our holiday break, we cannot but end this post on a critical note and think, once again, that events like London Design Festival or Salone del Mobile, should carefully think what is actually their role in contemporary design world and if 19th century world’s fair exhibition model should still be applied today.

Rujana Rebernjak

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12/06/2012

Heatherwick Studio at V&A

Thomas Heatherwick is one of those creatives that you can’t actually fit in any precise category. He became quite famous in design-ish circles with his Spun chair produced by the Italian manufacturer Magis. When it comes to a wider acclaim, it only came about when he was charged with designing the British pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and earlier this year with the re-design of the London bus. Not that designers ever become superstars outside of their closed world, but that says a lot about the knowledge wider public has of the discipline.

Fortunately there are some institutions that recognize the quality and importance of people that shape our visual and material world. Hence, when Victoria and Albert Museum announced a grand retrospective of Heatherwick’s work, it really came as a relief.

Entitled “Designing the Extraordinary”, the exhibition runs through almost twenty years of professional career that started with a small studio Thomas, opened in 1994, after graduating at Royal College of Art. The exhibition has been set up using primarily models and objects the designer has accumulated in his studio in all these years, spanning from small scale object to architectural models.

Heatherwick is extremely difficult to classify under the limited boundaries of a single profession, since he has given shape to almost every kind of tridimensional objects. Gaining himself some lament coming from the architectural community, he has successfully designed both buildings, pavilions, shops, busses, chairs, benches and tables, giving each object unique quality and a distinctive signature. In a moment when disciplines collapse and design is an over-abused word applied to describe almost anything, a wider public can finally confront itself with a design excellence.