LDF 2012: Ten designers create a bench to mark a decade of the festival
There’s always a project like this at The London Design Festival but it’s rare the names involved are this fantastic, and the results so good. Bench Years at The V&A is a series of one-off benches designed by the likes of Barber Osgerby, Martino Gamper, Konstantin Gric and Felix de Pass, one for each year LDF has been running.
Established & Sons paired the designers up with a supplier and the brief was to create something that harnessed the attributes of materials from cork to ceramic, steel to marble. Wandreing around the grandiose setting of the museum’s John Madjeski Garden it’s a reminder that even the most everyday objects encapsulate dozens of design decisions, and it’s also one of the rare LDF projects you can sit on which is a bonus.
Our particular favourites were Felix’s simple, metallic structure, Martino’s gorgeous wooden offering and Konstantin’s surprisingly comfortable mosaic bench, reminiscent of every swimming pool you ever went to in the 1990s.
AL_A: Bench Years with Established and Sons
Barber Osgerby: Bench Years with Established and Sons
Felix de Pass: Bench Years with Established and Sons
Konstantin Grcic: Bench Years with Established and Sons
Alexander Taylor: Bench Years with Established and Sons
Martino Gamper: Bench Years with Established and Sons
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Rob Alderson is a freelance writer, editor and strategist. He was previously editor-in-chief of It’s Nice That and WePresent, and editor of Design Week. He publishes the newsletter Undo, which tries to make sense of how AI is changing design work, the design process and the design industry.
