Swarovski Optik have a reputation for optical excellence, thanks to over 75 years’ experience building finely crafted lenses, binoculars, scopes and instruments that take advantage of their parent company’s expertise in crystal cutting and polishing.

One of the Austrian manufacturer’s flagship models is the NL Pure 42, a pair of binoculars that offers three levels of magnification – 8x42, 10x42 and 12x42 – along with an ergonomically designed form factor. Swarovski Optik has now launched the NL Pure 42 model in a new colour, Burnt Orange, a blend of natural, landscape inspired hues with something that’s vivid and easy to spot (as opposed to the other colour, a sober green).

Designed for low light performance, especially at dawn or dusk, the Tyrolean manufacturer points out that mountain terrain is a natural habitat for binocular users keen to spot wildlife or navigate during a trek.

Part of the appeal of Pure range is what Swarovski Optik calls ‘Swarovision’, a way of shaping the lenses so that clarity of image is preserved right up to the edge. For the highest level of magnification, there’s a useful forehead rest so you can everything steady and in focus.

Swarovski Optik NL Pure Series in Burnt Orange, £2,410 for 8x42, £2,450 for 10x42 and £2,490 for 12x42, SwarovskiOptik.com, @SwarovskiOptik_Outdoor

Swarovski’s new jewellery collection marks a tantalising change of direction for the Austrian crystal specialist. With Giovanna Engelbert now installed as global creative director, we can expect a colourful rethink in both jewellery and stores, which are taking on a playful new identity as part of her vision for the brand as a ‘Wonderlab’ of crystal creativity.

‘I call the brand transformation we are living at the moment a “revolutionary evolution” and it’s exactly the same with the jewellery I’ve designed,’ says Engelbert. ‘I wanted to explore the pure beauty of crystal and how its magnificence roots in fundamental geometrical and logical structures. Looking at Daniel Swarovski’s first drawings was an inspiration,’ she says, referring to the brand’s founder, a glass cutter, who established the company in 1895. ‘The power of his dream drives me and is the path we will follow and bring Swarovski forward in future.’

Englebert’s desire to create bold, yet wearable, jewellery results in pieces that embrace oversized proportions in a rainbow of vivid hues. Necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets sink cushion-cut crystals into metal in sugary-sweet hues, or facet crystals into baguette cuts and edge them with gold plating. The affordable cocktail jewellery becomes tinged with the irreverence of the Pop Art movement – this is playful jewellery made to be stacked, piled up the wrists and earlobes and enjoyed. ‘It’s jewellery full of playful extravagance — one that doesn’t feel forced but is expressive and original,’ adds Engelbert.

The jewellery is accompanied by a campaign led by familiar faces: Adwoa Aboah, Malick Bodian, Fadhi Mohamed, Tess McMillan, Penelope Tree, Maggie Cheng, Jeenu Mahadevan, Lexi Boling and Jade Mallinger.

It also coincides with a rethink of the brand’s stores, with 28 new shops – dubbed Instant Wonder – opening across the world. In vivid colours and metallic textures, they evoke a candy-coloured fantasy world. ‘It’s very Alice in Wonderland lands in Willy Wonka’s candy store, meets the Pop Art movement,’ says Engelbert. ‘The interiors take inspiration from the prism of colour that crystal creates when charmed by light. Buying jewellery is a moment of joy and exploration, and we wanted a Wonderlab for all the senses that can ignite dreams

Information

swarovski.com

Click to watch designer Jaime Hayon discuss his new fairground carousel, for Swarovski. Videography: Tom Andrews. Courtesy of Swarovski

While carousels come in many shapes and guises, they have rarely strayed from the Victorian aesthetic that harks back to the heyday of the travelling fairground. A new carousel, unveiled in Wattens, Austria today by crystal manufacturer Swarovski, is an exuberant exception.

Created by Spanish artist-designer Jaime Hayon, the carousel is perched in the south-west corner of Swarovski Kristallwelten – the sculpture garden cum visitors centre nestled among the Tyrolean Alps, near the brand’s head office. Bucking the custom of colourful fairground rides, Hayon has rendered his design in black and white with accents of gold, all in contrast to the verdant surroundings. For Carla Rumler, cultural director of Swarovski and commissioner of the carousel, the choice of palette came as a surprise. ‘I thought it was irritating before I saw the renderings,’ she recalls. ‘But it turned out to be the most elegant thing.’

Walking up the winding path to the carousel, one first notices the jug-eared, cartoonish bust at the top, appearing to wear the carousel’s tented top as an enormous skirt. Underneath, the usual wooden horses have been replaced with fantastic monochrome seats. ‘For me, a carousel can be seen a moving museum,’ explains Hayon. ‘There are sculptures moving around, which can be seen as art pieces. So I started by drawing freely and creating creatures from my imagination.’

One eventual creature appears to be a cross between a balloon animal and a rubber duck, a smaller piece looks like a bipedal narwhal wearing Japanese clogs. For the younger riders, there’s a gentling rocking carriage that can be described as a cross between a snail and a dog, while the requisite spinning teacup has been adorned with playful clown faces.

More whimsical faces – formed of geometric shapes and drawing inspiration from African masks – can be seen on the awnings and fencing. They alternate between expressions of excitement, joy and wonder, mirroring the common reactions of visitors as they discover the attraction. Even the ride attendant’s cabin is topped with a winking character that balances a sausage-like form on its head.

While the project brief did not require Hayon to use Swarovski crystal, there are 15 million pieces deftly integrated into the design, including the wall panels that wrap around the central pole (punctuated with geometric mirrors), the faces on the awnings, and the carousel’s ceiling, which is inlaid with playful drawings in typical Hayon-esque fashion. Sparkling under the summer sun, they draw further attention to the already eye-catching forms.

There are ample view points to admire the carousel, including an observation deck a stone’s throw away, but the best way to experience it is by climbing aboard. Here, a lively soundtrack plays in the background, its classical melody offset by a contemporary bassline. One is torn between caressing, then straddling the fibreglass creatures; admiring the optical illusions created by striped elements in motion; and taking in the glorious views, including the glass-faceted tower by Snøhetta nearby (which serves as Kristallwelten’s café) and the more traditional Alpine architecture and majestic hills in the distance; all while basking in fairytale-like wonder.

Hayon is keen to defy the stereotype that the carousel is a child’s ride. ‘This is an art piece, and art should be for all audiences. I think that adults need to dream and to dare, like children do. When Swarovski asked me to make this carousel, I thought it would be the perfect project. Because even though it can be linked to children, it’s been the perfect opportunity to break the rules.’

INFORMATION

swarovski.com; hayonstudio.com

If the idea of manufacturing and production facilities brings to mind closed, dark industrial spaces and a dark-box process, think again. Snøhetta’s latest project, Swarovski Manufaktur in Wattens, Austria, breaks all the rules of what an industrial space could look like. 

The structure, which is part of the crystal specialist’s larger HQ and campus in the Tyrolian countryside, was conceived to house both production and creative processes; and most importantly merge the two – bringing makers, designers and clients together for co-creating sessions that open up the whole process of innovation. 

The space is as welcoming as its purpose suggests. Large, open spaces feature manufacturing lines alongside drawing boards and offices. A centrally placed, dramatic staircase acts as a key circulation core, but also doubles as a meeting space and main ‘forum’ at the heart of the facility.

The interiors are bright, clean and filled with natural light. Sun shines through the building’s glass-lined sides, but also the ceiling, through openings known as ‘cassettes’. The white steel ceiling incorporates 135 such openings, coated with special material to ensure there is no glare. On top of this, the building meets the criteria of the LEED Gold Standard (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for sustainability.

‘We tried not to interpret the physical properties of crystals in our building geometry’, explains Snøhetta’s Patrick Lüth. ‘Instead, we have tried to understand what makes crystal so special and attractive, and to use these ephemeral qualities to create a specific atmosphere. The space has an incredible amount of daylight penetration which we believe is unparalleled in the typical production facility context. Crystals only come to life with light, so for us it is the intense presence of that daylight that is the most important aesthetic aspect of this building.’

INFORMATION

For more information, see the Snøhetta website

Nothing signals the start of the holiday season like the unveiling of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and this year, there is one more reason to celebrate; renowned New York architect Daniel Libeskind has joined forces with crystal experts Swarovski to create the tree's Star, the Big Apple's highest symbol of Christmas cheer. 

The numbers are impressive. The tree-topper weighs some 400 kg, spans 2.80 m in diameter and features 70 spikes covered in three million Swarovski crystals. Finely crafted at the Austrian company's factory in Wattens and then a specialist maker in Rhode Island, the piece makes excellent use of Swarovski's time-honed skills in crystal technology and refraction of light. 

The overall design is a real show stopper, a dynamic, three-dimensional structure that bears the signature angled shapes and surfaces of its creator's architecture. Light reflects artfully off the crystal surfaces and a balanced volumetric composition underlines that this piece is a work of sculpture, rather than mere festive ornament.

Revealed today, the Star will be joined by a Libeskind-designed retail pop-up featuring crystal ornaments for the holiday season. The unit also appears on the Rockefeller Plaza in a shape that echoes that of the Star, all crystalline forms and reflective surfaces. The 13.5m space includes glass panels and video screens, enveloping the retail element. 

‘The new Swarovski Star for the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree is inspired by the beauty of starlight – something that radiates meaning and mystery into the world', says Libeskind. ‘The Star is a symbol that represents our greatest ambitions for hope, unity and peace. I am tremendously honoured to collaborate with Swarovski on the Star, and with the entire design team, to bring cutting-edge innovation and design to crystal technology.'

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Daniel Libeskind

Swarovski presents the next instalment of its Designers of the Future initiative, an award supporting emerging talent who exemplify innovation in design. Unveiled at Design Miami/ Basel, this year’s recipients are Frank Kolkman, Study O Portable and Yosuke Ushigome who have responded to the theme of ‘smart living’ with a trio of installations which apply crystal technologies to our living environments, focusing on accessibility, sustainability and interactivity.

Experimental Dutch designer Frank Kolkman’s ‘Dream Machine’ is an immersive crystal light and sound installation which synchronises with human brainwaves to provoke a state of deep relaxation or ‘artificial dreaming’.

Building on the works of 1950/60s avant-garde artists such as Brion Gysin, Tony Conrad and Bernhard Leitner, Kolkman collaborated with London-based sound architect Sam Conran on the project, who has created a bespoke 3D composition based on brainwave stimulation, which uses binaural beats for a sound design inspired by diffraction patterns in X-ray crystallography.

‘Technology today advances very rapidly and sometimes without much consideration or critical thought about how it can be meaningfully implemented in our lives,’ says the designer. ‘I believe design can be an excellent sense-making tool amidst these developments.’

Taking a different approach is Japanese technologist Yosuke Ushigome, who explored the material from a behavioural point of view, merging his practice with Swarovski’s signature product. Imagining a world where crystal acts as an alternative interaction between human and machine intelligence, his home shrine installation counteracts the robotic exchanges typical of smart home devices, delivering data in a conversational and ritualistic way. ‘

Designers get to work with emerging technologies before they get embedded deep in our culture,’ Ushigome comments. ‘This can play a tremendous role in shaping our future and imagination.’ His installation is accompanied by an film produced by Mute Animations, which explains the evolution of technology and smart living.

‘Slanted Tiles’ is another dynamic interpretation of the material from Study O Portable, which puts crystal in conversation with a domestic environment. Working with Swarovski’s cutting technology, the duo have taken an analogue route in their installation exploring the emotion evoked by the changing light and colour from the gems, creating surfaces which have been translated into a series of screens.

‘To work directly with set materials and processes is a different approach for us and it’s been really enjoyable,’ say designers Bernadette Deddens and Tetsuo Mukai. The result is a mesmerising screen of colour that captures interesting light interactions creating graphic shadows.

The installations signify Swarovski’s constant quest for innovation and experimentation with its unique material, forming new directions in design culture.

See more from Design Miami/Basel 2018

INFORMATION

‘Designers of the Future’ is on view 12-17 June at Design Miami/ Basel. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Design Miami/ Basel
Hall 1 Süd, Messe Basel
Switzerland

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Every year since 1986, the fashion world has been invited into the modernist sanctuary of the sprawling Villa Noailles, hidden in the hills above Hyères. Installations from ready-to-wear, photography and accessory design talents stand in rooms once occupied by prototype chairs by Marcel Breuer, the textiles of Sonia Delaunay and paintings by Mondrian and Braque; the ghost of Giacometti lurks in the surrounding gardens.

The villa was built by Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles in the late 1920s as a manifesto of modernity, with spaces dedicated to the pursuit of physical fitness. For the 33rd International Festival of Fashion and Photography, the walls of the squash court were papered in outsized celebrity portraits taken by the President of the Fashion Photography jury, Bettina Rhiems, for Details magazine in the late 1990s. The covered indoor swimming pool on the top floor hosted an exhibition of designers including Nicolas Ghesquière, Jun Takahashi and Azzedine Alaïa, curated by Haider Ackermann who presides over the Grand Prize of the Jury Première Vision. Christelle Kocher, artistic director of the House of Lemarié, laid 4.5 metres of white cotton cloth out on the terrace, inviting guests to craft delicate flower embroideries from rhinestone, silk, cotton and rhodoid.

Many of the talents dialled down the technology-first stance taking over much of the design world; creativity, craft and common sense were on intense display. In a narrow room flanked by rippled plastic columns sat the work of the ten shortlisted accessories designers, each honing their own, earthy style. Overseen by Kocher, the accessory prize is in its second year and is the only competition of its kind in Europe.

The mood was majestically millennial: part-accessory-part-protest, the duo behind Keef Palas, whose work we featured last month, showed earrings fashioned out of garlic cloves and olive leaves; Jinah Jung from South Korea collaged discarded prototype trainers donated by Le Coq Sportif into sculptural bags; Cécile Gray from Paris (who was awarded the public prize) developed a technique of making gauzy garments from steel wire during a sabbatical from her job as an architect. Piecing every junction of her windowpane-check filigree dress together took 150 hours of handwork. She said, ‘You need time to become an expert and in this busy, fast-paced world this is something we should cultivate.’

The finalists in each of the categories are chosen by a notable roll call of judges selected from more than 300 applicants. In recent times a more cross-disciplinary, collaborative approach has become de rigueur, reflecting a wider shift in attitudes to creation.

Fittingly, the Swarovski Fashion Accessories Grand Prize of the Jury went to product designers Flora Fixy and Julia Dessirier who were approached by photographer Kate Fichard to re-think the crude, perfunctory design of domestic hearing devices. The resulting project ‘H(Earring)’ sits at the junction between medicine and fashion. The judges were impressed with how the aid had been emphasised and exaggerated using wax casting and 3D modelling – its sculptural qualities rendered in precious metals. ‘Fashion is an amplifier for socio-political issues. Our jewellery is first an answer to the user’s needs, but it is a political tool too,’ the winners said.

In 2003 the Villa Noailles became an arts centre open to the public. Its cold white angles form a sharp backdrop to the corporeal business of fashion. New York based Eva O’Leary was awarded the prize for photography with her series ‘Spitting Image’, which records the seconds between reflection and the rejection of the self. O’Leary photographed teenage girls sitting in front of two-way mirrors. ‘Letting someone photograph you is such an act of trust,’ she says. ‘This project has so much to do with vulnerability and the power in it. How we see ourselves, how we wish to see ourselves – the separation between the two.’ The girls in her photographs are a generation who use their mobile phones as mirrors. ‘The project was fuelled by a frustration at having to hide perceived flaws and I could sense that many of my own insecurities were belittled in the culture at large. Working with the girls was incredibly liberating, it was as if we shared a secret and could finally talk about it. This work made me trust my instincts in a new way,’ she said.

The focus on physicality stood out in Paris-based photographer Allyssa Heuze’s work too. She was awarded the Wallpaper* ‘New Generation’ x Hyères Photography Prize for her quirky, performative series entitled ‘OÏ’. A mixture of still life and staged portraiture, Heuze’s work challenges mainstream representations of sex in a playful and metaphorical way. She will shoot a fashion story for Wallpaper*’s January 2019 ‘New Generation’ issue, our annual celebration of fresh creative talent. ‘I have the same childlike, naive mind-set with my subjects no matter what I am shooting’ she says. ‘I’m interested in everyday objects and everyday scenes… telling a story through moments that are usually banal, with humour.’ There is both an oddness and a positivity to her pictures.

The grand prize was awarded to Wallpaper* Graduate Directory 2018 designers Rushemy Botter & Lisi Herrebrugh for their collection ‘Fish Or Fight’. Billed as an ode to their shared Caribbean roots, the duo took inspiration from fishermen whose large colourful nets, worn slung over the shoulder, were translated into draped coats and louche, layered separates. ‘I sketch and from there Lisi takes the lead, translating the sketches into real garments,’ Botter said. ‘We don’t want it to look difficult. It takes a lot of technical details to give it this ease.’ Based in Antwerp, the designers – who were also nominated for the 2018 LVMH Prize earlier this year – will be granted 15,000 euros and will collaborate on a project with Chanel’s Métiers d’Art. Mercedes-Benz will also invite the duo to show during Berlin Fashion Week’s Spring 2019 collections in July.

Mercedes-Benz has supported the festival since 2012. This year, it showcased shortlisted designers from the fashion RTW category and pieces by previous winners and competitors. Last year’s grand prize winner Vanessa Schindler returned to Hyères with a collection developed in partnership with Chanel's Maison Lesage. Her work establishes a new vocabulary for fashion and uses liquid polyurethane to secure layers of fabric. ‘I had some time to visit all of the different maisons first and by January I knew exactly what I wanted to do,’ she says of the collaboration. ‘I asked them to embroider plastic and they agreed – they were so open-minded it was crazy!’

Maison Goossens produced earrings onto which Schindler poured liquid polymer. She said, ‘I work more like a sculptor in a way. But I am not an artist. I make fashion.’

The Canadian designer Marie-Ève Lecavalier received an Honourable Mention from the Jury for her MA collection entitled ‘Come Get Trippy With Us’. Described as a luxury version of the psychedelic visions of Frank Zappa's music, Lecavalier worked with thick leathers, left over and rejected from production and recycled denims. Jeans featured in each outfit either as wide trousers, or left unstitched at the crotch as skirts. The look was precise, powerful and poised. ‘I think it’s important to make things by hand,’ she said. ‘I think this attitude is coming back and that’s exciting.’

Lecavalier – who is interning at Raf Simons in Antwerp and was also awarded the Chloé Prize for her plaited leather and diamante dress – embodied the millennial pragmatism of this year’s festival: a focus on touch; a return to making special things special again; a consciousness of consumption. The new guard are battening down, working together, talking, delivering meaningful, beautifully-designed statements. ‘It’s really only about your work and how it touches people,’ she says.

INFORMATION

Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography took place from 26-30 April. For more information, visit the Villa Noailles website

The world of manufacturing has always been a hotbed for innovation and experimentation, often veering towards extremes, from the industrial revolution’s steampunk mess and hierarchical layouts, to modernism’s clinical tidiness and utopian dreams. In contrast, today’s factory is a much more elegant, informal and welcoming affair. Open and egalitarian, the 21st-century production facility promotes interaction and conviviality for its staff, but also invites the outside world in. Heralding a new architecture for the genre, here are three companies reinventing the way we approach, design and experience the modern making space.

Swarovski, Austria
Architects: Snøhetta

A busy, efficient factory can be an extraordinary thing to experience. More than a production facility, it can be a production in its own right; a choreographed dance between man and machine on constant repeat. This has never been more apparent than at Snøhetta’s extraordinary new building for Swarovski in Wattens. Here, high in the Austrian Alps, the manufacture of all the crystal conglomerate’s products will now be prominently on display in a vast, open space, which is more cultural destination than dark industrial park.

The Manufaktur building, which will officially open this spring, will include product showrooms, prototyping machinery and meeting spaces. Part of a €100m investment by Swarovski into a scheme to transform its manufacturing procedures and client relationships, it is one of three key new or revamped buildings. Campus 311, a former crystal-cutting factory, is being transformed into the new product development and innovation centre; while Focus Factory 2.0 is a new crystal-cutting centre that brings the entire production process under one roof.

With its sweeping central staircase, a Snøhetta hallmark, suspended floors and angular viewing platforms, the Manufaktur building has been designed in a way that will encourage its occupants to expand their view both literally and philosophically. Flooded with natural light, thanks to its innovative open-ceiling structure, and with expansive floors housing much of the machinery, the space is energising and elegant – a long way from the traditional industrial shop floor.

The vision, according to the Swarovski Group chairman Markus Langes-Swarovski, was to design the crystal workshop of the future. ‘The Manufaktur is a totally new typology,’ he says. ‘It’s a manufacturing facility, a showroom, a co-working space, a cathedral. Not because it’s a place of worship, but because when you’re in that building, it has a scale which I think creates a lot of humbleness in relation to the body, and yet, also, intimacy.’

The brief for the building, which is linked by a new footbridge to Campus 311, was to create a customer collaboration and co-creation centre that will see Swarovski’s clients, including major fashion houses, work directly with the product development teams. It fell naturally to long-time collaborator Snøhetta. The architecture practice, best known for the Oslo Opera House and Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina, also designed Swarovski’s Kristallwelten, a tourist destination that has become one of Austria’s most popular attractions since it opened in 1995.

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Snøhetta founding partner, is passionate about the new project’s potential. ‘It really is setting a new standard for inclusive fabrication facilities,’ he says. ‘Bringing clients, designers, artists, researchers, machine operators, technicians and the public under one roof is going to change how we think about these relationships in the future.’

The new facility will enable Swarovski to fast-track product development and collaboration with clients, allowing them to come up with product concepts and deliver them in a quarter of the time it would have taken in the past. ‘It’s a very holistic A-Z set-up, where people can see what happens in other departments,’ explains Langes-Swarovski. Considering it is a factory, it is indeed a surprisingly human-centric space. ‘We are not trying to use humans as machines. Machines can do that job much better now. So we wanted to build a context in which the human can become human again.’ The open design of the building will allow a ‘much higher hit rate for coincidences’, says Langes-Swarovski. ‘The architecture is forcing this kind of collaboration more than before. I’m really excited about what kind of things will happen in there.’

It is possible that in the not too distant future, the campus will become a stage for productions of an altogether different sort, engaging not just local but wider communities, too. ‘In keeping with gently opening up the company culture, we could think about opening it to the public 50 times per year,’ moots Langes-Swarovski. ‘Just with a small number of people – nothing dramatic.’ As we wait for his plans to crystallise, there’s no doubting Wattens is increasing its cultural clout.

Writer: Henrietta Thompson

Kvadrat, Denmark
Architects: SevilPeach

A small flock of Icelandic sheep gambol in a field, dodging artwork embedded in the turf. Hardly the view from most international HQs, but this is the seaside resort of Ebeltoft, Denmark, where Kvadrat has been based since 1968. The company operates from a 1980s Poulsen & Therkildsen-designed home, which has just been updated and extended by London-based architect firm SevilPeach to cope with a spectacular surge in sales – Kvadrat has tripled its revenue over the past seven years, and ships 14.4km of textiles each working day.

SevilPeach has created a visual link between a new showroom space and those staff working on Kvadrat’s future products. ‘We’ve knocked through the walls so that the new product development department has internal windows with vistas of the product,’ explains architect Sevil Peach. ‘It’s an emotional connection.’ In the main red-brick building, she and her team opened up the building to establish connections with the countryside. Desk-based staff are now in bright, airy rooms rather than small offices. And with the demolition of yet another wall, a former office was turned into a library, again with views of the landscape.

Peach has also unified the spaces by introducing swathes of colourful textiles, ‘almost like a coloured thread woven through the building’. Fabrics are used for their acoustic properties, draped on an extreme scale on three sides of the room and as 7m-tall doorways. ‘It’s about using textiles as an architectural intervention rather than just decorative,’ she adds.

Kvadrat’s 140 or so staff now have just over 12,000 sq m across the HQ. And as for the sheep, they have direct access to installations by landscape architect Günther Vogt, and artists Olafur Eliasson and Roman Signer. So everyone’s happy.

Writer: Clare Dowdy

Charlie Bigham’s, UK
Arhitects: Feilden Fowles

A typical location for a food processing plant is a vast out-of-town industrial estate, but for a company trying to stand out from the ready-meal crowd, an anonymous shed doesn’t cut the mustard. Which is why Charlie Bigham’s, which prides itself on preparing fresh ingredients by hand, took the audacious decision to bring in the architects and build a new home. The brand’s fish pies and chicken tikkas, marketed as the antidote to low-grade convenience food, are now made in a timber-clad, pitched-roofed, light-filled ‘kitchen’ courtesy of young London firm Feilden Fowles.

Charlie Bigham, who founded the business in his own kitchen in 1996, believes that the highest-quality food can only be produced in a high-quality working environment. But rather than extend his existing site on west London’s Park Royal Trading Estate, he has moved part of the business to a disused limestone quarry near his Somerset home. Here, Feilden Fowles’ £21m building has a backdrop of 50m-tall cliff walls of iron-rich stone, and shares the 18-acre site with peregrine falcons and great crested newts.

‘We wanted to get away from the standardised shed, which is low-ceilinged and windowless,’ explains project architect Elli Farrant. Instead, the firm turned to typical quarry vernacular, and found inspiration in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s iconic images of industrial buildings. Bigham wanted to foster a collaborative, non-hierarchical dynamic between the office and production staff. So Feilden Fowles set out to create a 6,500 sq m structure on a human scale and to make it as good a place to work as possible. Hence the asymmetric pitched roof line, with north-facing roof openings that let natural light into the building.

That structure means the ground-floor production facilities have 5m-high ceilings, a good 2m higher than those in standard sheds. Feilden Fowles’ involvement took the architects right on to the production floor, to make the flow of goods ‘as linear and efficient as possible’, with storage, cooking, assembling, chilling and dispatch all positioned in their logical order.

Instead of being located on the mezzanine, the open-plan office space overlooks the nearby quarry wall. That means suited staff are not peering down on to the shop floor through glass walls. Rather, the mezzanine houses a light-filled canteen, used by all. At the centre of the plan is the development kitchen, where Bigham concocts new recipes.

At the macro scale, the architects have considered the whole campus layout, grouping the buildings on the southern edge of the plot to leave the northern edge and its ecosystem in peace. The intention is to encourage yet more wildlife by eventually adding lagoons. Also on the drawing board are another two kitchens, a dispatch centre, visitors’ centre, pavilions in the landscape for the eventual 1,000 employees to take their lunch breaks, and a Bigham’s Academy.

‘To be a long-term business, you need to retain the best people, and to do that you need to create the best possible working environment,’ says Bigham. ‘For us, that’s about making a bit of a statement with our environment. And that means good architecture and a uniform you are proud to put on.’ Long-term for the founder means 20 years, a timescale he can work to, as the business owns the site. Gratifyingly, Feilden Fowles has also taken the long view. Hence the building’s rough-sawn Siberian larch timber exterior, which will take on a silver hue over time.

Writer: Clare Dowdy

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Swarovski website;
the Snøhetta website;
the SevilPeach website;
the Kvadrat website;
the Feilden Fowles website;
the Charlie Bigham website

Annually, the Swarovski Designers of the Future award champions a select group of promising designers and studios who exemplify new directions in design culture. It handpicks vanguard talents whose practice moves beyond pure furniture or product design, and into the realm of inspiration, innovation and concept.

Announced on 18 April in Milan, this year’s winners are Frank Kolkman, an experimental Dutch designer focused on robotic technologies; Study O Portable, a research based Dutch-Japanese practice making objects about the designed environment, and Yosuke Ushigome of TAKRAM, a creative Japanese technologist specialising in emerging technologies.

Each year, Swarovski provides the designers with a brief that speaks to an element of its ethos. Topically, this year they were challenged to create a prototype or statement responding to the theme of ‘smart living’, applying crystal technologies and energies to our lived environments, create a dynamic exchange between the digital and physical. They were asked to revolve their thinking around a number of longstanding buzzwords of contemporary design, including accessibility, sustainability and interactivity.

To inspire the creative process, the laureates immersed themselves in Swarovski’s idyllic, mountainside headquarters in Austria. They explored the company’s archives – an Aladdin’s Cave of designs from the world’s most creative minds, from encrusted Christian Dior slippers, to a strand from that Oscars curtain.

The resulting project plans span the analogue to the artificially intelligent, encapsulating Swarovski’s esteemed history, but also looking to its future. ‘Dream Machine’ – an immersive crystal light and sound installation from Kolkman – synchronises with our brainwaves to provoke a state of deep relaxation or ‘artificial dreaming’; Ushigome’s ‘Can Crystals Interface Us to AI?’ exhibition will explore the potential of crystal as an alternative interaction between human and machine intelligence that occurs within the smart home; meanwhile, Study O Portable has gone back to crystal basics, looking at the natural, sunset-like colour patterns they produce, to create a series of surfaces which will be transformed functionally into a table, screens, and lights.

The completed designs will be displayed at Design Miami/ Basel later this year, and were chosen by a formidable panel of judges, including Nadja Swarovski, member of the Swarovski Executive Board; Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curatorial advisor of Design Miami/; Fuseproject’s Yves Behar, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the London Design Museum.

Watch the Swarovski Designers of the Future discuss their projects, above.

INFORMATION

Design Miami/ Basel runs from June 12-17 2018. For more information, visit the Swarovski website

Everyone loves to party at Salone del Mobile, there’s no doubt about it. But over the last couple of years, we have noticed that the party has definitely started to feed into the exhibitions themselves. New launches are getting paired with a negroni, brands are popping up with culinary installations, and furniture is getting a disco makeover. We invite you to party on with us via our top dinner, drink and disco exhibitions at Milan Design Week...

elit Proun bar, by Carmody Groarke and elit vodka at Wallpaper* Handmade

Inspired by Russian Constructivism and the work of artist El Lissitzky – both references for the vodka brand elit – the Proun bar offered a retox opportunity amid all our Wellness + Wonder. Named after a series of paintings by El Lissitzky – Proun being a Russian acronym for ‘project for the affirmation of the new’ – Carmody Groarke’s totemic composition of aluminium modules is a spatial experiment as much as a fully functional bar space. Its modular composition nods to El Lissitzky’s work and will allow the bar to be disassembled and reinstalled at future art events.

17-22 April; Via della Moscova 28

Make A D(w)ish at 28 Posti

During Milan Design Week at Navigli-side restaurant 28 Posti Chef Marco Ambrosini and industrial designer Odo Fioravanti ask: what makes a dish a dish? The duo has created a six-course tasting menu conceived as a tongue-in-cheek meeting of food and design that pits Fioravanti’s obstacle course-like tableware against Ambrosini’s inventive Campanian-style fare. The menu included patisserie-style macarons flavoured with anchovy, a Duchamp inspired ‘ready-made’ Pasta al Pomodoro, and a course simply titled ‘empty dish’ — a nod to the dwindling portion sizes in upscale restaurants. The outcome is a cleverly thought out concept menu that, thankfully, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Writer: Laura Todd

17-22 April; Via Corsico 1; www.28posti.org

Disco Gufram at Mediateca

We partied with the likes of ‘Charly’, ‘Betsy’, ‘Stanley’ and ‘Tony’ in Milan this year with Gufram’s soul-powered furniture collection at the Wallpaper* Handmade Mediateca space this year. These Disco-going characters hark back to the Italian brand’s disco design past for a playful new collection that is imbued with typical Gufram exuberance. Each collaboration is developed organically: beginning with Dutch artist duo Rotganzen, whose signature disco balls (originally created for site-specific installations) feature on a series of lacquered cabinets (pictured). Read about the rest of the collection here

17-22 April; Via della Moscova 28; www.gufram.it

Chez Nina by India Mahdavi at Nilufar

Puppeteer of immersive wonderlands India Mahdavi masterminded a refined exclusive club environment inside the coveted gallery. Taking its name from Nina Yashar (founder of Nilufar Gallery), the space is all wrapped up in textured De Gournay wallpaper, complete with Mahdavi-drawn geometric patterns on a sweeping silk mural. Opulent furnishings by Gio Ponti, Martino Gamper and more from Yashar’s collections pepper the space, alongside bespoke acid candy table tops. This spot was a place for after dark tipples, rumour swapping and relaxation.

17-22 April; Via Della Spiga 32; www.nilufar.com

Gabriel Scott at Bar Basso

Montreal-based design studio Gabriel Scott was inspired by Bar Basso’s fierce Negroni Sbagliato for his exhibition at the iconic haunt. Working together with its prolific owner, Maurizio Stocchetto, the pair realised a lighting installation in blown-glass and new custom satin copper, alongside copper hardware and alabaster glass to compliment the original 1960s decor. Courtesy: Gabriel Scott

17-22 April; Via Plinio, 39; www.gabriel-scott.com

Daniel's Café at Swarovski Palazzo

The crystal giants bought a hint of its hometown to Milan this year with a pop-up Daniel’s Café. The Wattens-based eatery served up Viennese patisserie to go alongside its glittering new collections. Menu highlights included a twist on Daniel Swarovski’s personal favourite, a cake with almonds, chocolate and blackberry jam, and flavoured macarons and praline chocolates.

17- 22 April; The Courtyard at Palazzo Serbelloni, Corso Venezia 16; www.atelierswarovski.com

Bar Anne by Space Encounters

Part exhibition, part bar, and (say its creators) part ‘fun happening’, Bar Anne was a space ‘by designers, for designers’. Amsterdam’s Space Encounters presented interactive work from the likes of Mae Engelgeer and Sabine Marcelis, alongside an immersive installation from Children of the Light. This was a place to be at home: guests were free to try and test each design as desired. ‘Sit on them, jump on them and even sleep on them’. As the week drews to a close, the latter was necessary.

17-21 April, Corso di Porta Ticinese, 95,; www.klaaskuiken.nl
 
The Diner by David Rockwell

Over in the vaults of Ventura Centrale, the New York-based architect channeled his skills in hospitality and set design for an all-American diner concept. The Rockwell Group teamed up with studio 2x4 and Surface magazine for the venture that recreated four different environments, within one space. The culinary pop-up took guests on an American road trip that travelled from an Airstream-inspired coffee and pie bar to West Coast lounge via an East Coast-style classic diner.

17-22 April; Via Ferrante Aporti 15; www.rockwellgroup.com

Club Unseen by Studiopepe

Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto of Studiopepe realised a conceptual ‘members only’ space at a concealed Brera location. Club Unseen bought together historical and contemporary design with products from global brands including Tacchini, Dedar, Atelier de Troupe and Pulpo. The club continued the Milan-based creatives’ exploration of hospitality which last year saw them create The Visit, a sophisticated styled apartment. Read more about Club Unseen here.

By appointment only; www.clubunseen.com

Vino & Design’s EustachiORA

Tree-lined Via Eustachi was transformed into a district of wine and design during Salone del Mobile – all in the spirit of sharing. With the aim of overturning natural compeition between traders, EustachiORA united a selection of designers and wine makers in a week-long knees up. Guests were invited to taste, for example, a red ‘Natissa’ DOC at Polpetta D.O.C, together with the works of artist Paolo Anselmo, all the while learning the insider tricks and traits of Italian wine culture.

17-22 April, via Eustachi

Seletti’s Design Pride

Parading around the 5VIE district for the 3rd year on the trot was Seletti’s political party of music, dancing and design. Joining forces with Paridevitale agency, Toiletpaper, Gufram, Heineken, Saviola, Hospitality Truck and a whole host of designers, the trail included special rap performances and fabulous floats for individuals to let loose with their creative flair.

6PM on 18 April; Piazza Castello (corner with via Minghetti); www.seletti.it

Lavazza x Toiletpaper bar

Italian coffee experts Lavazza joined forces with Toiletpaper magazine for a graphic pop art-inspired bar inside the Wallpaper* Handmade space this year. The immersive space served Aperitivo treats and reworking’s of traditional Italian dishes, while giving guests a taster of its new vibrant coffee machine collection

17-22 April; Via della Moscova 28

Nonostante Marras

Building on the success of last year’s pop-up restaurant Italian fashion designer Antonio Marras hosted up to 60 diners again in the events space neighbouring his atelier. This time his Nonostante Marras bistro was created in collaboration with the restaurateurs behind Domus Rana. Dining chairs were upholstered in Saba ecru linen hand-painted like canvases with faces and figures by Marras. Meanwhile vases, tiles and tableware was co-designed specifically for the project by Marras and Vincenzo D’Alba, and made by Kiasmo. Above diners heads a canopy of floral motifs by Wall & Deco added to the decorative, flamboyant feel. Canadian lighting designer Matthew McCormick hosted a dinner at the restaurant, among others.

INFORMATION
Salone del Mobile runs from 17-22 April

It seems Dubai has lofty ambitions when it comes to trying to establish itself as a creative hub on the international design trail. Having launched its own design week a few years ago, the third edition took place last month and attracted 60,000 visitors, 50 per cent up on last year. The six-day event, anchored around the vast 15.5 million sq ft D3 design district – the second of three building phases currently underway, led by Foster & Partners – offered up a host of exhibitions, installations, a programme of over 100 talks, which included a keynote discussion with Sir David Adjaye, a tradeshow and an international graduate event.

Exhibitions that unearthed new regional talent were a highlight. At ‘ABWAB’ (which means ‘door’ in Arabic), a showcase curated by the festival’s head of programming, Rawan Kashkoush, served up the work of 47 designers from 15 countries, who are creating contemporary design mostly made employing traditional techniques or materials rooted in the region. The event was held within a freestanding, temporary pavilion made from discarded mattress springs by Dubai-based Fahed & Architects. Also of note, ‘Middle East Design Now!’ a new nomadic collection, founded and curated by Wallpaper* editor-at-large, Suzanne Trocmé. Having held its debut at this year’s London Design Festival, this extended show examined the work of 12 emerging designers from six countries including Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, UAE, Egypt, Lebanon and Morocco.

High profile international brands were in attendance too. Czech-based glass specialist Lasvit collaborated with local designer Khalid Shafer on Silent Call, a light sculpture inspired by the domed roofs of five well-known mosques, each of which lights up in sequence according to Islamic prayer times within different time zones. The fine white lights represent people making their way to or from each mosque. Swarovski, which has had a showroom in the district for some time, was celebrating its 10 year relationship with London-based design duo Fredrikson Stallard by presenting Prologue, a circular sculpture, four metres in diameter, featuring over 8,000 amber crystal droplets attached to a steel frame.

The tradeshow, Downtown Design, held by the D3 waterfront, was also the largest edition yet with 150 exhibitors (including brands such as Baccarat, CC Tapis and Lladro) on offer.

The Global Grad Show was another high point of the week. Curated by Brendan McGetrick, this year’s focus was on sustainability and empowerment and showed some 200 forward looking prototype projects from graduate designers from 92 universities from 43 countries. One example – and winners of the inaugural Progress Prize – was the Polish design duo, MIKO+ who designed a collection of jewellery that acts as a brace for those with wrist injuries or carpal tunnel syndrome.

The newly installed head of design at Art Dubai Group, William Knight, a former director of London’s 100% Design and the deputy director of the London Design Festival, sums up. ‘It was an outstanding week, which made a positive impact on everyone that visited events and the city itself. The event demonstrated the creativity and commitment of Dubai’s creative community and its supporters.’ 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Dubai Design Week website

Legend has it that Daniel Swarovski (1862 – 1956), founder of the eponymous crystal dynasty, carried the first crystals he ever cut inside his walking stick. It would rattle as he walked through the factory calling ‘Hallo!’ to his workers each morning.

The same kind of folkloric storytelling shines at Kristallwelten – Swarovski’s dreamlike HQ near Innsbruck, Austria. It comprises a landscaped sculpture garden, a showroom, restaurant and ‘play tower’ designed by Snøhetta, along with an underground maze of 16 ‘wonder chambers’ created in partnership with local and international designers.

Accompanied by a well-timed dusting of crystalline snow, this week sees the opening of four new chambers, designed by Arik Levy, Austrian artist André Heller, Indian fashion designer Manish Arora, and starchitect-on-the-rise Fernando Romero.

Swarovski’s cultural director Carla Rumler asked only one thing of the designers: ‘make it about crystals’. Despite a diversity of themes, perspectives and materials, each sparkling chamber echoes the next. The resulting journey through the minds and methods of four very different designers, says Rumler, is a ‘sensual and emotional’ encounter – one which celebrates the creative possibilities of cut glass.

Traversing topics of love (Arora), peace (Heller) and the environment (Romero and Levy), the new chambers promote a message of personal reflection, as well as the glitzy reflection of crystals.

Heller’s moving chamber ‘Heroes of Peace’ uses crystal optic technology to cast life size holograms of Martin Luther-King, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Rigoberta Menchú onto a stage, before they burst into a holographic snowfall of paper birds. Back down to earth, in his chamber ‘Transparent Opacity’, Levy asks us to interrogate the material complexity of crystals, creating a dizzying room (not dissimilar to a conceptual jewellery showroom) of individual objet d'art projecting colour and light across the room. Elsewhere, Manish Arora’s Indian summer chamber explodes with joie de vivre, taking lighthearted kitsch to another level of loud. Concluding the journey by looking upwards, Romero’s ‘El Sol’ crystal sun casts a red glow across his chamber, accompanied by a booming soundscape of noises from the sun, courtesy of Nasa.

Each chamber reflects Swarovski’s ongoing shift from crystal manufacturer to cultural institution. ‘What we do here is so much more than a commerical proposition,’ says Markus Langes-Swarovski, board chairmain of Swarovski Group, ‘we are interested in new perspectives surrounding crystals, experimenting creatively with them in different contexts.’

Brilliant: The Story of Atelier Swarovski – a new book published by Condé Nast that coincides with the Kristallwelten expansion – emphasises Swarovski’s creative, collaborative record. Focussing on the design-centred branch of the Swarovski name, Atelier Swarovski (launched by Nadia Swarovski ten years ago), the book documents the brand’s work with Christopher Kane, Jason Wu, Mary Katrantzou and Fredrikson Stallard among others, alongside a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld and Hubert de Givenchy – names that go hand in hand with the kind of innovative creativity Swarovski is now so intimately associated with.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Swarovski Kristallwelten website

ADDRESS

Swarovski Kristallwelten
Kristallweltenstraße 1
6112 Wattens, Austria

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Crystal giant Swarovski is throwing open the doors of its glistening workshop for a special collaboration. Ahead of this year's London Design Festival, it has invited design duo Fredrikson Stallard into the guts of its production process to create bespoke crystal components – from scratch.

With a creative partnership spanning more than 10 years, its only natural that the Austrian brand would choose the experimental duo for this extraordinary project. Entitled 'Glaciarium', the collection consists of chandelier components, four chandeliers – 'Avalon', 'Helios', 'Superline' and 'Voltaire' – alongside pieces for Atelier Swarovski, the brand's home acessories label, which debuted at Salone Del Mobile earlier this year.

From the process of melting the raw materials in the kiln through to carving, the pair immersed themselves in the heart of the Swarovski factory world. 'The whole oven becomes lined with a sea of solidified crystals, which the workers have to remove from the walls by hand,’ say Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard, adding, ‘the bits they chisel out are just rocks, but the surfaces are really beautiful, because the crystal is behaving in the way it wants to behave.’

The collection resonates with the duo’s idiosyncratic style – a deft mix of the raw and refined – from the showering dome of rough crystals in 'Avalon' to the symmetrical line-up of exposed shimmering forms in 'Helios' and 'Superline'.

This same bare sensitivity is also imbued in the Atelier collection. Featuring abstract shapes in each contour, the ornaments' curves and sweeps are unnatural yet exquisite at the same time.

‘Glaciarium crystals are the result of decisive intervention, one that helps rigid materiality sing its unique melody,’ explains Museum of Arts and Design director Dr Glenn Adamson, who draws similarities between the duo's practice and that of American sculptor Scott Burton. He says, ‘Like Burton, Fredrikson Stallard do not transform or rearrange matter into something unrecognisable, but reveal its inherent character.'

Fredrikson Stallard will open up their studio to the public on Thursday 22 September, where design pilgrims will be able to see the 'Glaciarium' collection in the flesh. Meanwhile, its unique crystal components will be available for other designers to play with thereafter, courtesy of Swarovski Professional distributors.

INFORMATION

’Glaciarium’ will be on view at the Fredrikson Stallard studio on 22 September, from 10am-6pm. For more information, visit the Atelier Swarovski website

ADDRESS

10a Warner Street
EC1R 5HA

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Swarovski presents its second instalment of the Designers of the Future initiative, unveiled today at Design Miami/Basel. Anjali Srinivasan, Studio Brynjar & Veronika and Yuri Suzuki are the recipients of this year’s award, and for the past six months the three studios have worked on a new project with crystal, unveiled in Basel.

Winners were announced in Paris earlier this year, and have since had the opportunity to immerse themselves and their practice in the crystal world of Swarovski, at the company HQ in Wattens, Austria.

Glass artist Anjali Srinivasan created an installation inspired by human gestures. The RISD graduate merged her glass works with Swarovski’s crystal savoir-faire, using the company’s 'Touch Crystal' enriched with touch-sensitive technology to respond to human touch with light. ‘Crystal is a highly engaging material because it is a solid object that creates visual effects that you cannot touch,’ says the designer. Srinivasan created a monumental crystal wave supported by a six-metre tall mesh structure, supporting 3,000 Swarovski crystals and 5,000 pieces of glass that the artist produced at her Dubai studio. The project inspired her to progress this practice towards an exploration of the crossroads between optical and physical phenomena, as well as continuing this work on human-centric design.

Another dynamic interpretation of the material came from Studio Brynjar & Veronika. The Icelandic pair presents ‘Currents’, an installation that puts light in conversation with crystal. With three different elements to their installation, the designers bring crystal to a domestic environment while exploring new uses and applications for it. Their designs instil new life on seemingly mundane household objects: a standard blind is reimagined with prisms to offer rainbow-coloured projections when hit by light, and crystal tiles are designed so that when hit by water they diffuse a liquid reflection of their surroundings. The third and final element sees a collection of crystal sticks which explore the transparency of the gems through light.

Japanese sound artist Yuri Suzuki explored the material from an acoustic point of view, merging his practice with the Swarovski signature product. ‘I was very excited to investigate how the vibrations in crystals can be interpreted as sound,’ says the artist. ‘Exploring the Swarovski archives to look at past innovations was invaluable research.’ His mechanical, interactive ‘crystallophone’ is composed of 16 brass mechanical ‘notes’, each featuring a handmade crystal form and representing tones from C1 to D3. Working closely with Wattens’ engineers, Suzuki’s project is a marvel of art and technology.

‘It is exciting to see a strong new selection of emerging talent from around the globe exploring their visions of future living to create beautiful and thought-provoking new works using crystal,’ comments Nadja Swarovski. The trio of installations, coming together under one roof, give a stunning example of the company’s quest for innovation and an apparently unlimited ability to experiment with their unique material. After seemingly ticking all creative boxes, from fashion to home collections, large-scale installations and micro-crystal creations, their ongoing Design Miami/ commitment of Designers of the Future is a testament to the company’s dedication to research and innovation, and it demonstrates once again that Swarovski is not scared of challenging the impossible.

INFORMATION

Swarovski's Designer of the Future award runs until 19 June at Design Miami/Basel, for more information, visit the website

Photography: Mark Cocksedge

As far as New York rituals go, the moment the Metropolitan Opera House’s glamorous crystal chandeliers ascend into the ceiling during first curtain surely ranks as one of the most beloved. Created by Hans Harald Rath of Austria’s family-owned glassware company Lobmeyr, which was founded in 1823, the chandeliers have been on object of wondrous fascination since the New York Metropolitan Opera opened on 13 September 1966.

The iconic chandeliers – including 11 in the lobby and 21 in the auditorium – were commissioned exclusively when the opera house moved from its original location on Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets, to its current home on Lincoln Center Plaza. In keeping with the building’s bold statement of modernity, the architect Wallace K Harrison supplied Rath with several space-age references, including a copy of Le Ciel, a book on cosmology by the astrophysicist Jean-Claude Pecker.

Legend has it that Rath, creatively road-blocked, happened upon the constellation-like design by inserting toothpicks into a potato. Whatever its genesis, the resulting ‘Auditorium’ design, the first to use Swarovski crystals on such a scale, proved to be a massive success (the line remains Lobmeyr’s bestseller).

In addition to its intergalactic design legacy, the chandeliers also stand as a symbol of the relationship between Austria and the United States. The lighting was an official gift to the United States by the Republic of Vienna, recognising the Marshall Plan’s assistance in jumpstarting the European economy after the Second World War.

In 2008, the chandeliers were taken down and thoroughly cleaned for the first time since 1966. ‘It was then we realised just how beloved these chandeliers actually were,’ says Lobmeyr’s Leonid Rath, the designer’s grandson, at an event celebrating the chandelier’s 50th anniversary. ‘It was clear that these were not just a regular piece of interior design or lightning. Before they were taken away, all of the staff, including the stagehands, wanted to make sure we would take suitable care with their prized chandeliers.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Lobmeyr’s website

Photography courtesy Lobmeyr

ADDRESS

The Metropolitan Opera
30 Lincoln Centre Plaza
New York, NY 10023

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Swarovski's plans are never short of dazzling and their latest launch, Atelier Swarovski Home – due to be unveiled at Salone del Mobile's Brera district – is not one to disappoint. 

Falling under the Atelier Swarovski aegis, an enterprise launched in 2007 to create fashion accessories with international designers like Viktor & Rolf, Jonathan Saunders and Karl Lagerfeld, the Atelier Swarovski Home branch will operate in the same manner: bringing to life design pieces by the world's most respected designers as well as emerging international talents, celebrating the brand's unique crystal artistry.

An all-star cast, including the likes of Daniel Libeskind, Ron Arad, Raw Edges and Tord Boontje, have created a number of unique designs ranging from objets d'art to candlesticks, trays and vases. The late Zaha Hadid designed a piece for the brand too, in her signature sinuous style. 'Crista' is a centrepiece in crystal and metal, taking as its starting point an investigation into the process of crystallisation occurring in nature.

Many of the pieces in the Atelier Swarovski Home collection contrast crystal with other materials. Aldo Bakker, for example, chose to work with a range of Italian marbles in different colours, cut by the same craftsmen who work with crystal in Wattens. Two marble and one crystal 'supports', as the designer calls them, hold a single stem at the centre.

Among the debut collection will be Ron Arad's large, decorative letters, cut from crystal following a new typeface created by the Israeli designer and inspired by the house's crystal figurines; Frederikson Stallard's pure crystal shapes which will combine raw forms with precision cuts in a tabletop collection; Tomás Alonso's UV-coated crystal and marble trays and vases; and a majestic chessboard created by Libeskind. 

As with all Swarovski projects, the collaborators were invited to make full use of the technologies developed by the brand’s experts throughout the years, including crystal printing and the revolutionary 'Wave Cut' technique.

INFORMATION

Photography couresty of Swarovski Atelier Home

As the art world descended on Hong Kong for five days of Art Basel and the dizzying collection of satellite shows that piggyback on the main event, the art market held its breath wondering if the region’s economic slowdown would translate into fewer sales compared to last year’s spree.

Serious art lovers, however, obviously found moments of inspiration – particularly at the top end of the spectrum, thanks to ambitious works by the likes of Michaël Borremans at David Zwirner (all five of his paintings sold on day one to Asian collectors) and Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary’s abstract Raintree etchings at Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Elsewhere, the middle market galleries, whose works were decidedly less glitzy than last year, found the going a little more challenging. Despite this, there were gems to be found, including South Korean artist Ham Kyungah’s statement-making Chandeliers for Five Cities, a collection of tapestries secretly created by North Korean textile workers.

Gallerist Pearl Lam put on a good show, with an extravagant collection of mixed media including Self-Portrait with Red by Antony Micallef; as did Pace Beijing with a mesmerising digital video work by teamLab, and KaiKai Kiki’s works by Aya Takano and Mr.

As in previous years, however, some of the most innovative cultural offerings were to be found outside of the main fair. Must-sees include the surreal film installation Duilian at Spring Workshop by the artist Wu Tsang, based on her decade-long research into a Han Chinese revolutionary beheaded by the Qing government in 1907; and art hub Duddells' collaboration with the Dallas Museum of Art, presenting emerging artist Margaret Lee’s works.

Meanwhile, Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s monumental Time Waterfall façade light installation did battle with the heavy rain clouds that shrouded the International Commerce Centre at Kowloon Station, while on the same side of the harbour, British artist Conrad Shawcross’ mathematics-inspired robotic light sculpture entranced guests at The Peninsula hotel. Across town, Los Angeles artist Larry Bell transformed Pacific Place mall with three enormous reflective glass cubes.

Art Central's Stiff & Trevillion-designed waterfront tent was also well worth a detour, with Elaine Yan Ling Ng’s beguiling Sundew installation for Swarovski; Hong Kong gallery Sin Sin’s extraordinary Growth drawing of roots by Indonesian artist Dwi Setianto; and Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s collection of tactile works by Jane Lee. We were also particularly taken with New Zealand gallery PAULNACHE’s architectural installation Wall Hang; and The Cat Street Gallery’s playful lacquer carvings by Shanghainese artist Jacky Tsai.

With so much happening across the city, it came as no surprise that Art Basel has announced its intention to expand its focus from art fairs to help a selection of global locations (yet to be announced) to develop their cultural landscapes.

INFORMATION

Art Basel Hong Kong 2016 is on view until 26 March. For more information, visit the Art Basel website

ADDRESS

Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre
1 Harbour Road
Wan Chai
Hong Kong

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Elaine Yan Ling Ng and Swarovski have teamed up to create Sundew – an extraordinary installation on view at the second iteration of Hong Kong’s Art Central. Watch the work in action above

Swarovski returns to Hong Kong’s second iteration of Art Central this year with an extraordinary crystal-inspired Sundew installation that has an unforeseen flaw. 

The multisensory series of sound-activated sculptures – resembling carnivorous plants and made of hand-crafted textiles by Hong Kong-based designer Elaine Yan Ling Ng – is so mesmerising that it has had a show-stopping effect, as visitors stand transfixed by the spectacle near the fair's entrance.

‘Sundews in nature lure their prey in just like this,’ says the designer, who graduated from London’s Central Saint Martins in 2010 before founding her own studio, The Fabrick Lab, in Hong Kong. Last year, Ng was named one of Swarovski's Designers of the Future with the first in her Sundew series unveiled at Design Miami/Basel 2015.

Although it goes by the same name, the current installation marks a significant evolution of the original series.

‘I’ve made some very ambitious changes,' she explains. 'Double layers of crystals add a new dimension but complicate the mechanical movement where the sculpture mimics the opening and closing of the sundew tentacles, as it closes in on its prey.’

The goal of the project was to reinvent textiles, examining ways of using crystals as a structure rather than just a decorative material. Around 20 million Swarovski crystals were used.

‘I love working with natural fibres so it was important for me to understand the quality and behaviour of crystals, to help engineer how the textile flows with the machine,’ Ng says. 

The interactive exhibition entices all the senses, attracting its prey with two custom made fragrances: ‘Entice’ to help attract its prey, followed by a more intense fragrance appropriately titled ‘The Kill’.

The works also react to sound, with each form programmed to recognise a certain note.

Ng admits that within the family of sculptures, the relatively understated elegant rose pink form is her favourite. ‘It is so simple yet powerful. It was a labour of love to make as each strip was hand wrapped with textiles and then laminated with a special resin before being hand cut into strips to create that simple gradation. It has already captured me.’

INFORMATION

’Elaine Yan Ling Ng: Sundew’ is on view until 26 March. For more information, visit the Art Central Hong Kong website

ADDRESS

Art Central
Central Harbourfront Event Space
9 Lung Wo Road
Central, Hong Kong

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Behind every great design company is an equally – if not greater – business mind. As part of our Power 200 list of the globe's pre-eminent design talent – a doubling of our Power 100 list, devised as part of our celebratory 200th issue of Wallpaper* – we've collated a list of the brightest big bosses in the business; the men and women who match vision with strategic smarts, and manufacturing and design innovation with a confidence that quality will, eventually, win out.

On one side, we have those eponymous heads of totemic and established companies at the top of their games: such titans as Carlo Molteni and Alberto Alessi, Michael Maharam, Rolf and Mette Hay, Roberto and Renato Minotti, and Nadja Swarovski, the latter of whom has transformed a twee brand into a dazzling design patron.

On the other, the power CEOs revitalising and pushing existing brands to the peak of their powers: Claudio Luti at Kartell, Kvadrat's Anders Byriel, Georg Jensen's David Chu, Restoration Hardware moderniser Gary Friedman, Marianne Goebl at the Vitra-owned Artek, ClassiCon's Oliver Holy and Vitra's own co-CEO Nora Feldbaum.

In between – though no less significant – are other tactical mega-minds such as Vipp’s CEO and chief designer Kasper Egelund and Morten Bo Jensen (respectively), Flos' lighting maven Piero Gandini, SCP founder Sheridan Coakley, Emeco-embellisher Gregg Buchbinder, B&B Italia CEO Giorgio Busnelli and the sharply intuitive Patrizia Moroso.

It's hard to underestimate the significance of our chosen 20 – the individuals with our contemporary design identity in their hands, and the facilitators pushing the world's brightest design talents to stratospheric new heights.

See the Power 200 in full here 

Sheridan Coakley: Founder of SCP, which turned 30 this year. Pictured: Top left, Matthew Hilton, the late James Irvine, Michael Marriott, Sheridan Coakley, Terence Woodgate, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic, shot at the company’s Milan debut in 1996, more than a decade after SCP was founded. Beneath, the same group today, with designer Marialaura Rossiello Irvine standing in for her late husband, James, and Grcic, who couldn’t make the shoot but sent us a life-sized paper cut-out instead. As featured in W*194.

INFORMATION
See the Power 200 in full

Fresh from the three collaborative crystal interpretations shown at Design Miami/ Basel, Swarovski now presents its latest tie-in, this time with the Norwegian designer Kim Thomé. Zotem is an 18m tall sculpture embedded with bespoke Swarovski crystals, to be unveiled at London's Victoria and Albert Museum on 19 September.

The double-sided monolith will be placed in the museum’s entrance as a defacto landmark for the London Design Festival (for which the V&A acts as a central hub). As with projects previously placed in this area, Zotem will encourage visitors to peer into the ceramics galleries upstairs and further explore different rooms of the building and its architecture.

‘When I first asked about the space that we would be using, I went up to the ceramics floor,’ explains Thomé, ‘I had always found it quite hard to get up there, even though it’s one of my favorite places in the V&A. For me it was important that the motions of the crystal patterns actually lead your eye upwards.’ 

His piece consists of a matte black aluminum structure cut into a geometric grid pattern, framing over 600 Swarovski crystals to create an enchanting, prismatic effect. A roll of printed mesh will continuously move inside the frame, creating dynamic colour action as the natural light shines through the sculpture and is refracted and reflected by the crystals. The elusive name of the project is a conflation of 'totem' and 'zoetrope', highlighting the work’s shape and its movement (a zoetrope being a rudimentary 19th century animation device and early precursor to film proper, the movement of which is similar to that of Thomé’s contraption). 

‘I am a big fan of basic linear patterns,’ explains the designer, whose work often features geometric use of bold colours. 'I was interested in using prismatic colours, all the colours of the rainbow. I just wanted to put the colours back into the crystals.’ He likens the final result to a chandelier's refractions of light, but enhanced, highlighted and transformed into a dancing show of colour. 

The designer calls his work ‘a basic optical illusion’, with which he would like to puzzle and confuse his audience. ‘I’d like them to try to engage with it and see how this concept works,’ he explains. ‘I’d also like them to come away having been on the sixth floor of the V&A and amazed by the crystal. That's the main part of it.’

Two months ago, Swarovski gathered the design community in Milan to unveil the three winners of the Designers of the Future initiative. Chosen for their avant-garde approach to design, Hong Kong-based Elaine Ng, aka. The Fabrick Lab, and London-based Tomas Alonso and Studio Swine were chosen to work with Swarovski on projects that explore the company’s crystal savoir-faire merged with each designer’s area of expertise.

The three projects, unveiled today at the opening of Design Miami/Basel, showcase a diversity that is as much about aesthetics, as it is methods and intent. Each designer produced a body of work that forms both a clear representation of their practice and takes their modus operandi to new levels through Swarovski’s materials, traditions and inspirations. The designers were approaching crystal for the first time, and after an exploratory trip to Swarovski's origins in Wattens, Austria, they set out on their individual paths. Working with the Austrian craftsmen, they combined science, avant-garde technology and traditional crystal craft to create - both literally and figuratively - brilliant designs.

Spanish designer Tomas Alonso focused on 47°, the theoretical angle at which crystal either reflects or refracts light, depending on the viewer’s point of view. Inspiration came from Swarovski’s objects: the way they reflect light and the colours spectrum they create. ‘I was looking at colours and how the light creates these colour effects, and I was trying to create a way to emphasise these colours,’ explains the designer. His collection features an ambitious number of pieces that include trays, lamps and table-top objects, each composed of different parts of crystal joined at a 47° angle and glued together using UV bonding techniques and a vast variety of colour techniques to mimic naturally occurring hues within crystals. 

Studio Swine’s focus was on the pure crystal, following the designers’ explorations into unusual design materials (their Hair Highway collection combined human hair and resin to produce magnificent pieces). Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves were impressed by the range of crystal available to them in Wattens, and particularly drawn to the Swarovski XERO, the world’s smallest precision cut crystal, sand-like chatons of just 0.7mm diameter. ‘We kept thinking about the engineering and ingenuity that went into that, so we really wanted to do something with this tiny product, and make it big,’ explains Murakami of their initial idea. ‘We are used to taking a material that is often overlooked and undesirable, and try to make it desirable,’ continues Groves. ‘Crystal is already so desirable, we didn’t want this to be a case of the metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a caterpillar’ he jokes. Their project revolves around an imagined narrative of Planet Swarovski, a new spatial discovery, and a young Terraforming engineer sent to space to explore its crystal composition. Their work combines the minuscule crystals into several pieces which include an hourglass, a table and a solar system tabletop object.

Textile artist and designer Elaine Ng’s fabric-based experiment comes in the shape of a moving installation inspired by Sundew, an intriguing carnivorous plant. DEWs is an interactive installation of embroidered crystal sculptures, which move according to sound and movement around them. ‘My key mission was to employ crystal as a raw material and not a decorative feature,’ the designer explains. She combined her textile expertise with the craft abilities of the Wattens’ technician and craftsmen. ‘The technology and knowledge I was given through the trip was immense,’ she mentions, recalling her introduction to the Wattens facilities, ‘it has changed my mind about the way to design and apply crystal.’ Ng worked with six different fabricators on various embroidery methods using cane, PVC and textile, going as far as using crystal as a base to embroider onto.

'Innovation and experimentation are at the core of each commission from the winners,' said Nadja Swarovski, currently at the helm of her family's company. 'This is the avant-garde approach to the use of crystal in design that has been a part of Swarovski's DNA for 120 years – and will continue to drive us forward.'

Swarovski has unveiled a series of innovative new buildings and exhibits as part of a major expansion of its Kristallwelten ('Crystal World') in the picturesque village of Wattens, Austria, where the family-owned brand was established 120 years ago.

The revamped 7.5-hectare complex dedicated to all things crystal reflects the company's close collaboration over the past two decades with leading designers, ranging from John Pawson, Tom Dixon and Zaha Hadid to Naoto Fukasawa, Arik Levy and Ross Lovegrove.

The most striking new addition to the alpine setting is an intriguing multi-faceted, vertical tower with a glass façade designed by Oslo-based architecture firm Snøhetta. Inside is a series of play zones, with an enormous trampoline and a vertigo-inducing, 14-metre-high climbing net arranged over four floors. Meanwhile, 360-degree windows turn the space into what feels like an air playground, surrounded by snow-capped mountains.

Snøhetta was also commissioned to create a new café and restaurant at the entrance to the complex. Their organic, low-slung pod of curvaceous concrete offers views over a contemporary landscaped garden, which features a custom-designed, 1,400-square-metre 'Crystal Cloud' installation by French and Vietnamese artists Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot. The silvery-grey clouds, "floating" above a mirrored pool, were hand-decorated with over 800,000 crystals in three different sizes.

Nearby, a bulging, mossy hillside sporting the unlikely visage of a smiling giant that doubles as a waterfall marks the entrance to Swarovski's newly expanded museum building. Among the five new creative exhibits is a standout new work by British creative duo Fredrikson Stallard. 'Eden' is a multi-sensory forest of simple brass structures and crystal sculptures symbolising exotic wildlife behind a digital waterfall. South Korean artist Lee Bull also plays with notions of modern utopian landscapes with 'Into Lattice Sun', building an elevated bridge that visitors use to traverse the artist's abstract crystalline world of sculptures. Elsewhere, the Studio Job 'Wunderkammer' playfully embraces pastiche, with a fairground-inspired spatial experience that alludes to the chaos of modern society, using a cabinet of curiosities as a starting point.

ADDRESS

Kristallweltenstraße 1
6112 Wattens
Austria

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Milan's Salone del Mobile has today played host to yet another design innovation, with the announcement of the 2015 Swarovski Designers of the Future Award winners.

Hong Kong's Elaine Ng Yan Ling and London-based Tomás Alonso and Studio Swine scooped up the prestigious prize, which will see the young talents collaborate with Swarovski to produce works for the 10th anniversary edition of Design Miami/ Basel (16-21 June).

Selected by a jury of leading figures in the design world, including Wallpaper* Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers, Swarovski's Nadja Swarovski and fuseproject founder Yves Behar among others, the award is known as an annual indicator of the most exciting names to watch in the industry. Previous laureates include Asif Khan, Philippe Malouin, Bethan Laura Wood and Max Lamb. The latter three are showcasing impressive collections during this very Salone season.

As part of the award, this year's victors visited Swarovski's historic base in Wattens, Austria, to draw inspiration from the crystal brand's legacy of creativity and innovation. With the archives, workshops and various programs at their fingertips, the designers had plenty to play with, as illustrated in the film - revealed exclusively by Wallpaper* first - featured here.

Rodman Primack, executive director of Design Miami/, spoke of the significance of the prize to the artists and the design community as a whole. 'This year's winners are perfect examples of the kind of talent we are eager to shine a light on; they experiment with materials, push the traditional boundaries of design and bring fresh energy and ideas to the collectible design market.'

Last week in Miami, while the focus of the event was the voracious consumption of contemporary art and design, visitors were never far from the influence of a fashion house or two.

Gucci sponsored a small exhibition of work by artist Kris Knight - brooding boys painted in pastel tones - and Bisazza showed the mosaic designs, launched earlier this year in Milan, that converted iconic Pucci prints into dazzling wall treatments. A new design in cream, sea green, navy and brown, had been specially created for Miami. 'I love the way the tiles bring texture to the patterns,' said Emilio Pucci's creative director Peter Dundas. 'It reminds me of the mosaics in San Marco. It's sort of timeless.'

Over at Design Miami, Fendi's furniture arm teamed up with Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci of Dimore Studio. The current darlings of the fashion pack (they've recently worked with Bottega Veneta and Hermès) translated Fendi's luxurious ethos into a flesh coloured shorn mink daybed, and buttery leather armchairs, while a monumental shelving system, with thin coloured glass panels, looked like a modern, 3D stained glass window.

At Swarovski the issue was sustainability: 'They're trying to figure out how to use less water in their industrial process,' explained Margaret Cavenagh, the interiors director at architect Jeanne Gang's Chicago studio. Huge images of melting glaciers by photographer James Balog lined the walls of the booth where a central table was pitted with holes, like more melting ice. 'We want to start the conversation,' said Cavenagh.

After last year's success during Art Basel Miami Beach in building a-never-before-constructed beach house originally designed by Charlotte Perriand in 1934, Louis Vuitton jumped forwards four decades to produce 18 pieces of furniture designed by Pierre Paulin in 1972 for Herman Miller but never realised. 'Nicolas Ghesquière had asked to use the 'Osaka' sofa for his Cruise show in May - he's a collector of my father's work,' explained son Benjamin Paulin. 'So we told him about these unused designs, eh voila!'

They included the delightful floor-hugging 'Tapis-Siege' seating, with a triangular construction that can be reconfigured in many different ways. 'My father's ambition was always to put modernity into people's houses,' said Paulin. Bally, meanwhile, had erected one of Jean Prouvé's 1948 pre-fabricated houses in the garden of the Delano and filled it with 'minimalist sketches' of furniture forms by French duo Kolkoz, alongside American artist Zak Kitnic's exclusive series of metal shelving bearing a hermit crab printed pattern.

Not far from the Louis Vuitton show in Miami's sparkling Design District, a store called Mr Nobody and Mr Somebody had also popped up, offering a wildly eclectic mix of whimsical products designed by Sharon Lombard and made in Ghana, South Africa and the US (from golden chickens to walking sticks inscribed with slogans and vinyl flooring from a photograph taken in Rubens house) alongside clothing from the archives of Walter van Beirendonck and Bernhard Willhelm. 'My work's about curiosity and chaos,' said Wilhelm, sporting a violet baseball cap with a South Beach logo. 'It's made in Japan and Belgium. But we popped up in Miami, can you believe.'

The fact that good design is so important to Swarovski reminds us that it is not just crystals but precision-cut crystal products that shape its business. The brand's commitment to mentoring designers in fields from fashion to architecture is nicely reflected in the 6-year-old Atelier Swarovski initiative.

Twice a year, Atelier Swarovski launches a new luxury accessories line, of which jewellery is a major part. What makes it worth looking out for, however, is the fact that the collaborators are not, well, jewellers. They are designers. Simple as that.

Cue new collaborators, design duo Fredrikson Stallard and their 'Space Flower' collection. Made up of cluster rings, bracelets and necklaces in polished metal and crystal, the idea, they say, was for the pieces 'to create a virtual, animated sensation when worn. Like a virtual meadow'. 

We were intrigued, so we tracked them down to find out more...

The notion that the jewels change as you wear them is compelling. How did you create this 'animated sensation'?
Swarovski crystals are razor sharp in their cut and have an extraordinary ability to refract and reflect light. This was something that we wanted to nurture - to place the crystal into an element that would be able to underline these qualities, but also would allow us to multiply these effects and create flowing patterns that would sit well on the body, move with the body and, in such a way, come to life. Using single crystals allowed reflection and refractions to be magnified and move as the wearer moves. It was like creating a fourth dimension by letting both the crystal and its setting work together in a glamorous and elegant way.

The ergonomics of jewellery design - the scale of it; the fact that it has to work with the body - how did you grapple with that?
It was all about scale and applying the studio's ethos and manifesto to the body - we applied the same principles to jewellery that we do with much of our work. The scale is different and this obviously needs to be taken into account in terms of detailing and finishes but, as always, the end result should feel effortless and elegant and be true to the materials and their unique qualities.


Designers and architects often forget that jewellery has to work with the body. The Space Flower pieces are refreshingly considerate in that respect.
It is a very sensual and flowing collection. We wanted the pieces to be elegant and feminine, but in a very strong and contemporary way. We also wanted to allow the wearer to combine different pieces to different events, and for some pieces to be worn in different ways, depending on the hours of the day. 

Who or what was the muse?
We imagine the wearer of this collection as someone who needs to be elegant and at the same time strong and confident, but still with a contemporary feminine glamour. With much of our work, we embrace the emotional reaction from our audiences whether the end piece is jewellery, furniture or architecture.

The overall inspiration?
Whatever we design, we find inspiration in everything, including jewellery design, but our biggest inspiration is the fine art world - this in many ways offers greater creative freedom.


Are there plans for other related projects - jewelled objects perhaps?
There are already plans for future jewellery-related projects, but as always we keep these safe, with our lips sealed until we have the green light!

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Zaha Hadid's iconic Fire Station at the Vitra Campus in Germany and Swarovski has joined the celebrations by commissioning a new installation by the architect for the company's HQ in Germany. 

The Fire Station was a landmark project for the architect. 'I'm equally proud of all my projects as they each represent different times of my career and periods of research, but I have a particular affection for Vitra Fire Station as it was my first building,' says Hadid, whose full monograph, The Complete Zaha Hadid, also comes out this summer, published by Thames and Hudson.

'[Vitra Chairman] Rolf Fehlbaum shares my passion for architecture and was inspired by my early visualizations,' the architect adds. 'He dared to engage me without seeing a prior track record and without the certainty of public success. Returning to Vitra to work with Swarovski on this installation has been a very rewarding experience.'

The new work, entitled 'Prima', is created out of five individual parts that form a larger abstract piece, inspired by early sketches of the Fire Station. Prima is gun-smoke metal-coated, with a highly reflective sheen. The parts are made out of MaxPlatten, a composite material usually used for exterior cladding in buildings, combined with CNC milled hard foam for the sculpting of the piece's double curved surfaces. Spanning an impressive 11m in length and 8m in width, the art piece will be lit by led light strips. 

The commission forms part of Hadid's long relationship with Swarovski; the luxury crystal company is well known for its creative collaborations with some of the big guns of the art, architecture and design world. In this case, a display of Hadid's original sketches and architectural models of the Fire Station will accompany Prima, giving an insight into her creative process.

The installation will be unveiled on 11 June, coinciding with the Art Basel fair, and will be on show for two months. 

ADDRESS

Fire Station
Vitra Campus
Charles-Eames-Str. 2
D-79576 Weil am Rhein
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Who would have thought a crystal exhibition could be so noisy? Climb the stairs of the Design Museum to reach 'Digital Crystal' and the decibels quickly start to rise. First comes the gentle click-clack of Random International's 'Study of Sunlight Video' - projecting the journey of light in a digital age - swiftly replaced by the explosive snap, crackle and pop of Semiconductor's 'The Shaping Grows' in the first chamber of the exhibition. An assault on both the eyes and the ears, this multi-coloured video work shows how crystals grow and combine in a computer-generated crystal cave.

Next up is Fredrikson Stallard's 'Pandora' chandelier (originally designed in 2007), which breaks and reforms in a chaos of light, sound and crystal. And almost everywhere you turn in this Carmody Groarke-designed exhibition, things are moving or whirring.

'We wanted the exhibition to be an immersive experience,' says Swarovski creative development director Suzanne Trocmé, who commissioned eight new pieces for the show. For the last decade, Swarovski's design and architecture collaborations, showcased in its Crystal Palace exhibitions, have been inviting leading designers to experiment with crystal in radical new ways, but this is the first time the collaborators have been given a brief. Challenged to explore the notion of memory in a digital age - one in which physical objects are becoming 'an endangered species', says Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic - their multi-sensory offerings are unusually evocative.

Some speak about forgetting, such as Ron Arad's 'Lolita' chandelier - first conceived for Swarovski Crystal Palace in 2004 and reworked for this exhibition. Its 2000 or so Swarovski crystals are embedded with LEDs that allow visitors' text messages and tweets to be momentarily emblazoned on its twisting form. 'It's the opposite of carving a wall with words,' says Arad. 'This is ephemeral.'

Other works speak about remembering, such as Philippe Malouin's 'Blur' installation. The designer spins multi-faceted Swarovski crystal beads in circles at high speed, forming mesmerising abstract 'light paintings' of concentric coloured rings. Look away from these works and their intense prismatic patterns still swirl in your eyes.

Crystal is in itself an evocative medium. 'When you have a crystal, you always keep on moving it, because its kinetic light effect is so thrilling,' says designer Arik Levy. His 'Osmosis Interactive Arena' installation allows visitors to transform a digitally-generated crystal through their own movement, calling in to question how human actions are remembered by nature.

Whatever the subtext of the works, however, this frenetic and dazzling exhibition won't easily be forgotten.

Watch an interview with Ron Arad about Lolita

Watch an interview with Levy about his installation

ADDRESS

Design Museum
Shad Thames
London SE1 2YD

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS