London Design Festival: Bench Years in the John Madejski Garden at the V&A

London Design Festival has collaborated with the British furniture and lighting producer Established & Sons to create a series of one-off benches by ten different designers. Each bench is made with a different material and exhibited in the gardens at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the duration of the ten-day festival. The Bench Years aims to free designers from the usual constraints of designing urban furniture, for example, the over-cautious regulations for safety and vandalism. Instead, the group of ten benches, celebrating the ten years of the Design Festival, challenges the assumptions of the humble street bench. Here, you certainly won't see a standard wooden bench with arm and back rests.

 Bench of Plates by AL_A

London-based Amanda Levete Architects, collaborating with Ceramics Cumella have created a bench inspired by the V&A's extensive collection of ceramics. The glazes create a spectrum of earthy colours that reference the domestic crockery that has served dinner tables for years. The individually hand-made plates slide together and stack one on top of each other to create a sweeping curve. 

A-Bench Metal by Felix de Pass 

An original design from 2011, for a similar bench by Felix de Pass for Established & Sons, has been updated for the Festival. Simply made from folding sheet metal, the bench has punched holes to allow water to drain and an angled seat to create a comfortable place to sit. 

Tube by Alexander Taylor

This stainless steel tubed bench is inspired by felled woodland logs, though finished with a simple, mirror polishing finish to leave the material in its most natural, reflective state. 

Pier by Konstantin Grcic

German designer Konstantin Grcic collaborated with leading producer of glass mosaics, Bisazza to create a simply formed bench, which shows-off the small pieces of red, cream and grey glass. 

Western Facade by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby

This was one of my favourites, by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. Western Facade appears to be a rather simple monolithic block of marble, however, the random apertures refer to the V&A's Exhibition Road facade which is marked by shrapnel damage from the Second World War. The holes actually run through the whole length and width of the marble, never intersecting, but making the material more translucent. 

Pe de Porco (Pig Foot) by Fernando Brizio

As you can probably notice, this bench takes the form of a pig's trotter. Portuguese designer Fernando Brizio collaborated with Amorim to create a bench made of cork oak from forests where black pigs forage for acorns. 

Infinity Bench by Martino Gamper

Italian designer has created a hard-wearing bench celebrating the different colours and textures of hardwood. With the support of the American Hardwood Export Council, Gamper created a thermally modified hardwood for durability and stability

Images my own

London Design Festival: Mimicry Chairs, by nendo at the V&A

Dotted around the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, and part of London Design Festival, Japanese design studio nendo have created a series of white chairs that mimic the different areas of the museum. At each site, the chair is modified to reference the space; in the lobby, a single chair hangs ghost-like above visitors' heads, elsewhere, one balances on the stairs with different length legs. In the galleries, the chairs take on the shape and form of the arrangement of paintings, a mêlée of sizes quietly occupying the gallery space. 

 Images my own

Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary at the V&A

From tomorrow, the V&A in London will be hosting an exhibition on British designer Thomas Heatherwick as part of the museum's British Design season, which also includes the Ballgowns exhibition in the adjacent galleries. This is certainly not a retrospective by any means, seeing as the practice is still very young, but more a celebration of their studio. Making and creating are very central to the exhibition, with over 150 objects ranging from fully-functional models (the Rolling Bridge really does curl up as it does in real life, and will be demonstrated every Friday afternoon) to maquettes and test pieces that show the design process. The detail even goes down to the laser-cut labels that give off a vaguely smokey scent as you navigate the exhibition. On display is a section of a new London Routemaster bus, which recently started it's first journey on the No. 38, juxtapositioned next to a modest plank of wood that geniusly folds into pieces of furniture. The exhibition is full of contrasts; small and large, polished and rough, smooth and sharp, finished and unfinished. It's really like taking a walk through their studio. 

Rolling Bridge, Paddington Basin, London, UK 2004 © Steve Speller

 Teesside Power Station, Stockton-On-Tees, Teesside, UK 2011 © Heatherwick Studio 

 UK Pavilion Seed Cathedral, Shanghai Expo, China 2010 © Iwan Baan

New Bus For London, UK 2011 © Heatherwick Studio 

All images courtesy of V&A unless otherwise specified

Stop, Look, Listen: Three things to do this week.

STOP. British Design 1948-2012 at the V&A Until Sun 12 Aug

The V&A's exhibition, British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, celebrates the best of British post-war art and design from the 1948 ‘Austerity Games' to the summer of 2012. Over 300 British design objects highlight significant moments in the history of British design.

Image: V&A

LOOK. Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern. 4 April to 9 September 2012

The first substantial survey of Hirst's work in a British institution, the exhibition brings together key works from over twenty years, including iconic sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991, in which he suspended a shark in formaldehyde. 

Image: Tate

LISTEN. Life Drawing classes at The Last Tuesday Society. 4th and 18th April

Part of The Last Tuesday Society's lecture series involves a drawing club led by Mia Gubbay, working from life models interacting with the weird, wonderful and macabre exhibits of their shop-cum-gallery.

Image: Last Tuesday Society

V&A Christmas Tree by Studio Roso

Studio Roso, a creative partnership between Danish designers Sophie Nielsen and Rolf Knudsen, have created this christmas tree for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The handmade tree has been created with 1500 individual strands of elastic cord to create the form of a 4 metre high traditional christmas tree. Amongst these cords are various 'christmas ornaments' designed to mimic the crystalline structure of snowflakes and icicles. 

Images: Studio Roso

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the V&A

'Postmodernism: Style and Subversion', a retrospective exhibition held at the V&A in London, explores the controversial art and design movement, Postmodernism and it's influence on popular culture and it's relationship to mass consumption. This is a thoroughly in-depth survey into the radical ideas, which were centred on a mixture of the theatrical and theoretical, and based on complexity and contradiction. The move away from Modernism, with it's utopian visions of simplicity and clarity, formed the Postmodernism movement in the early 1970's, which was consumed in vibrant colour, bold patterns, artificial effect, parody, wit and freedom. Artists, architects and designers had a new self-awareness about style, and were not afraid to show it; "Postmodernism lived up to it's central aim- to replace a monolithic idiom with a plurality of competing ideas and styles". 

The exhibition is ordered chronologically starting with a series of rooms dedicated to architecture- the starting point of Postmodernism in the 1970s, with Italian architect's such as Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass. There is a small enclave near the start of the exhibition, featuring collages and video clips by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, the authors of 'Learning from Vegas'. The opening section also includes work by Aldo Rossi, Charles Moore and James Stirling, which combines motifs of the past with elements of the present. This is all set around the central feature of the gallery- a full-scale reconstruction of an architectural façade by Hans Hollein from the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on the proliferation of postmodernism through design, art, music, fashion, performance, and club culture during the 1980s. Ridley Scott's 1982 film 'Blade Runner' was a postmodern dystopian inspiration to designers, and materials were salvaged and distressed to produce objects of urban apocalypse- Ron Arad created a music system out of reinforced concrete. The 1980s were seen as the 'designer decade' with glossy domestic products excelling in theatricality and exaggeration. These were delivered to the masses via magazines and publications such as Domus and by designer groups such as Studio Alchymia and Memphis. Postmodernism began to influence music and film, with performers such as Grace Jones and Leigh Bowery creating larger-than-life stage personas. The last part of the extensive exhibition examines the hyper-inflated commodity culture of the 1980s. Consumerism and excess were vital parts of Postmodernism; from Andy Warhol's 1981 Dollar Sign paintings, to Karl Lagerfield's reinvention of Chanel, to Mickey Mouse teapots for Disney. The exhibition concludes with art and design from the late 1980s, towards the possible end of Postmodernism, encouraging visitors to consider how this all effects the present day. 

Images: Dezeen