Summer Pavilions

It’s the last few day to catch the Driftwood Pavilion by the Architecture Association, so if you haven’t had a chance to head down to Bedford Square do it before the end of this week! Designed by students from Unit 2 of the prestigious Architecture school, it was originally based on a concept by 3rd year student Danecia Sibingo. The pavilion is the fourth in the annual AA Summer series, to learn more about it and past projects visit - www.aaschool.ac.uk




Also launched this month was the Annual Summer Pavilion by the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens. This commission by the gallery is awarded to architects who have never built in the UK before and started back in 2000 with Zaha Hadid. This years offering is designed by Tokyo based Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, otherwise known as SANAA.

The pavilion will act as an extension of the gallery space and will host a number of events every Friday night under the title ‘Park Nights’ including poetry, performances and film screenings all the way to the end of September.

To learn more about events at the Serpentine over the summer and past Pavilion projects visit - www.serpentinegallery.org

Thinking inside the Box

With 100% Design on the horizon our friends at NoChintz have launched ‘The Box Project’ – a competition for North West creative talent. The Manchester based design team have designed a pre-fabricated micro-building - a 2x2x2m cube developed for ease of build and transport. Now they need something to fill it. The Box Project is a competition challenging entrants to design the function and reason for this 2mx2mx2m box which will be housed at 100% Design. The 15 finalists will be judged by a panel of respected experts, and the winner will have their creation made and showcased in September at 100% Design, the international design show in London.

Seeking to profile local creative talent and emerging designers from the North West we look forward to NoChintz' northern invasion of Earls Court this September.

To learn more about The Box Project and terms of entry go to www.theboxproject.co.uk

and to learn more about other NoChintz projects visit www.nochintz.co.uk

Bright Young Things

If you were not lucky enough to catch the Royal College of Art’s Design Show, we are afraid you missed another top year from the leading postgraduate art and design school, but not to worry - we at Relay have picked a few highlights for you here on Platform.

As ever, the Department of Communication Art and Design (www.cad2009.rca.ac.uk) produced a vast range of talent. Presented together with an intelligent and stylish exhibition design, which took the form of a colour coded directory. Designed by Jack Gilbey and Jaakko Tuomivaara, using a typeset by graduate Alistair Webb, it reflected the true diversity of the department.



We also particularly liked the designs by Povilas Utovka including fonts Marc and Monika (below).




More excellent print based projects came courtesy from Yoonna Choi including a new publication ‘Place Practice and Ten Dialogues’– an exploration of ten artists negotiating new and foreign environments measured through their work and creative output.

Felix de Pass produced ‘Desk’ – an extruded aluminium and solid wood frame desk with concealed tracks onto which various accessories can be attached – ‘folded sheet aluminium drawers, cable management solutions and privacy screens can all be fitted allowing the elementary desk to adapt and meet the varying needs of the user and situation’.


Meanwhile Min-Kyu Choi displayed the flat-pack plug, an ingenious design transforming the bulky standard UK plug into a practical compact form, taking the slim-line MacBook Air as the standard to be met.



There is also a multi-plug version, allowing three plugs the space and power of one standard UK plug – Check out You Tube for a short film.


Good environmentally and conceptually driven design came from Nitipak Samsen, who produced A.T.R.E.E.M. (Automated Tree-Rental for Emission Encaging Machine). A system allowing users to rent trees to offset their carbon footprint, making intangible CO2 manifest in terms of grams and minutes. Clever, politically minded design.