LDF announces landmark projects and an identity refresh by Pentagram

Date
4 May 2016

The London Design Festival has announced its landmark projects for 2016 and a refresh of its visual identity by Pentagram. This year, from 17 – 25 September, will see more than 400 events and installations take place across the capital bringing together an international roster of designers, artists, architects and retailers to “activate projects responding to the transformative powers of design,” say the organisers.

This year, Trafalgar Square will host a crazy golf course, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with holes designed by the likes of Paul Smith, the late Zaha Hadid, Atelier Bow-wow and more. At the V&A, Glithero has partnered with Italian luxury watchmaker Panerai for an installation called The Green Room that will delineate the space of a stairwell by creating a thin veil of threads that is kept in a constant, gentle motion by a CAM arm that emulates the movement of a clock. Matthieu Lehanneur will install Liquid Marble, a variation on his ongoing investigation into the materiality of marble, in the galleries and outside, in the courtyard, robots will build the Elytra Filament Pavilion (which we covered earlier in the year). Also at the museum design studio Layer will create Foil, a 20m-long installation comprising 40,000 individual metallic elements inspired by the foil of an electric razor.

Elsewhere across the city, Alison Brooks Architects will create The Smile, an inhabitable structure created using American Tulipwood CLT which the architect says will be “an undulating environment, something between a landscape, an adventure playground, a bridge and a diving board.” Continuing the CLT theme, architect DRMM will create Baboushka Boxes, another inhabitable installation that will, along with charity Shelter, explore the topic of housing.

Alongside the citywide celebrations, LDF sees the return of partner exhibitions 100% Design, Decorex international, Design Junction and more. There are also eight design districts, with Brixton being added to the programme for the first time.

The identity for LDF has been refreshed by Pentagram this year. The design responds to the Eames’ mantra that design is in the detail and has zoomed in on the typographic detail of the LDF logotype, “zooming into the negative spaces and elegant swashes of the typographic message itself.” Dominic Lippa, the partner at Pentagram who led the project, said: “The wonderful thing about type is when you use it in such a large scale and then crop it, you are often left with wonderful positive and negative shapes which have come out of the individual letterforms. The result is unmistakeably ‘London Design Festival’ but introduces an element that is engaging and playful as well as being classic and modern.”

Above

Pentagram: LDF 2016

Above

Pentagram: LDF 2016

Above

Alison Brooks Architects: The Smile

Above

DRMM: Baboushka Boxes

Above

Achim Menges, Moritz Dörstelmann, Jan Knippers and Thomas Auer: Elytra Filament Pavilion

Share Article

About the Author

Owen Pritchard

Owen joined It’s Nice That as Editor in November of 2015 leading and overseeing all editorial content across online, print and the events programme, before leaving in early 2018.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.