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      V&A curator picks five highlights from Bags: Inside Out exhibition

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      The 19th-century equivalent of an activist’s slogan tote and a portmanteau made from repurposed fire hoses feature in this roundup of V&A curator Lucia Savi’s favourite pieces from the Bags: Inside Out exhibition.On show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum until September of next year, the exhibition traces the evolution of bags from the 16th century to the present day.
      Over three distinct sections and nearly 300 exhibits, it explores the different functions that these carriers can serve, the ways they can communicate status and identity as well as the craftsmanship that goes into their making.
      Along the way, designs by luxury fashion houses rub shoulders with personal items belonging to historical figures such as Winston Churchill and artefacts sourced everywhere from Pakistan to Burma.

      “If you think about it, bags are everywhere. Men, women, children – everybody wears them and uses them on an everyday basis,” Savi told Dezeen.
      “We can’t even pinpoint when the first bag in history was made or used because it’s such a functional object that was useful for so many reasons – to travel from A to B, to transport personal belongings.”
      “But they can also be status symbols and carry meaning or memories. In the fashion business today, bags are often the biggest revenue drivers,” she continued. “The exhibition sets out to investigate what makes this object so special, so coveted and so multi-layered.”
      According to Savi, a key factor in this is the fact that bags allow their wearer to present themselves to the world while simultaneously revealing who they really are on the inside.

      Freitag’s Sweat-Yourself-Shop is a tiny factory for making bags

      “I think this is at the core of what bags are – they’re functional, they have meaning but they’re very private. We carry our most personal belongings in our bags and not everybody wants to open theirs and show off the contents,” she said.
      “At the same time, we carry them physically on the body, we’re commuting, were travelling. So there are these dichotomies between inside and outside, private and public.”
      This is evidenced by the millions of view racked up by “What’s in my bag” videos on YouTube and translated into the design of the exhibition itself, which is courtesy of London architecture practice Studio Mutt.

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      The ground floor of the V&A’s Gallery 40 is transformed to resemble the inside of a bag, with fabric partitions acting like the lining and dividing the space into small, intimate “pockets”. Here, the exhibits are displayed largely on their own, cracked open to reveal their vulnerable insides, while on the upstairs mezzanine the bags are showcased on mannequins, to suggest their public, outward-facing role.
      Bags: Inside Out opened its door earlier this month after being delayed twice due to coronavirus lockdowns and only a few days before Tier 3 restrictions were once again imposed on London.
      As a result, the museum is currently closed, so we have enlisted Savi to share her personal highlights from the show below:

      Jane Birkin’s Birkin bag by Hermès, 1984
      “This is the very first Birkin bag that was ever made. The story goes that Jane Birkin was on a plane from Paris to London in the 80s and was complaining to the man next to her that she couldn’t find a leather bag she liked. It turns out she was talking to the CEO of Hermès, so they start drawing some ideas on one of those paper [sickness] bags.
      “Now, the Birkin is the most recognised and coveted handbag of our time. It’s not easy to get hold of one, because of the price but also because you can’t just walk into a shop and buy one. They fetch crazy prices at auctions and a report found that the value of a Birkin is actually more stable and better-performing than gold.
      “The primary function of a bag throughout history was to carry valuables and in this case, the bag became a valuable object in itself. This is, of course, because of the craftsmanship and the quality – it takes many hours for a Birkin to be made and it’s all done by one artisan. But it’s also because of the exclusivity and the celebrity association, which together created the phenomenon of ‘it-bags’.”

      Anti-slavery workbag by Samuel Lines and the Female Society for Birmingham, 1828
      “This bag was made by women from the Female Society for Birmingham as part of their campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Printed on the bag is a powerful image of an enslaved woman who is breastfeeding while a man is telling her to go back to work.
      “This piece was showcased very much on the body, for everybody to see what these women were advocating for. It was used to carry pamphlets and campaign materials, which they sold alongside the bags to raise money. But also, because it’s a work bag, it was used to carry tools and little items that were used for sewing, so there’s really a double function there.
      “What’s interesting about this bag is that we just have the silk part but we don’t have the metal frame and the handles. So it really shows you how these bags were made by this group of women. Not many of them have survived but they exemplify an important function of bags, both historically and today, as a way of showcasing our beliefs.”

      Daln by Kazuyo Sejima for Prada, 2019
      “Bags offer fertile soil for experimenting with new ideas and for collaborations between designers, artists and more recently architects. They’re quite sculptural objects with a large surface area, so they’re almost like a blank canvas.
      “This collaboration is part of a collection called Prada Invites, where the brand recruited four female architects to reinvent its iconic nylon bag. Prada is a historic fashion house that started in 1913 as a leather luggage maker. But when Miuccia Prada took the helm of the company in the 80s, she introduced this very new material that you normally wouldn’t associate with luxury and redefined it.”
      “Kazuyo Sejima’s interpretation of the bag really gives the freedom to the wearer to reinvent the bag every time – you can un-zip some parts, make it longer or shorter. And you can add all these colourful, detachable pouches and pockets with soft shapes that contrast with the black, square body of the bag.”

      Weekend bag by Elvis and Kresse, 2019
      “More and more, we’re seeing brands try to work with materials that are not exploiting the natural world and not creating too much waste. But this brand, Elvis and Kresse, has been doing it for years and decades.
      “They saw that fire hoses, once they reached the end of their life, were just ending up in landfill. So they started to produce accessories out of them, using the material almost as if it was leather and fabricating the bags using similar machinery.
      “First, the hose gets washed and then it’s cut in half. It has two surfaces, a smooth and a dimpled one, and they combine these to create the designs. The lining is made out of parachute silk or old auction banners and everything from the packaging to the labels is made from rescued materials.”

      Iside Toothpaste bag by Bethan Laura Wood for Valextra, 2018
      “Normally, Valextra’s bags are quite severe. They’re very simple, very structured bags, but with the intervention of British designer Bethan Laura Wood on the handles and the addition of this sinuous, toothpaste-like hardware, the bag almost becomes a completely different object.
      “She was inspired by the linework of [Scottish artist] Eduardo Paolozzi and the piping along the side of the Valextra bag, where the leathers is inked to finish the seams. And I really enjoyed the idea of playing with that line and the fact that she intervenes on the hardware but not on the leather, which is a very interesting way of thinking about bags.
      “Working with a designer who normally maybe doesn’t work on leather or hardware and has never worked on bags, I think it does bring a completely different perspective. It challenges the makers and it creates almost like wearable pieces of art.”
      Bags: Inside Out is on show at the V&A in London until 12 September 2021. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      Anupama Kundoo's handmade architecture features in Louisiana Museum exhibition

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      A major exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark shines a spotlight on Anupama Kundoo, an Indian architect with an unique knowledge of traditional materials and craft traditions.Anupama Kundoo – Taking Time offers an insight into the ideas driving Kundoo’s “slow architecture” approach, which she has applied to both housing and community infrastructure.

      The first room, The Architecture of Time, is dedicated to archive material
      Favouring hand-made elements over mass-produced components, her work centres around ongoing, intensive research into sustainable practices and materials.
      This is revealed here through the inclusion of Kundoo’s architectural archive, which not only contains a number of intricate models but also various construction tools and material samples.

      Architectural models reveal the design of Kundoo’s own home, Wall House

      Exhibition highlights include a full-scale mockup of Kundoo’s affordable housing concept, Full Fill Home, which debuted at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.
      There are also detailed models of Kundoo’s own home, Wall House, a building that champions regional building traditions like achakal bricks and terracotta roofing systems.

      Wall House was built with local traditions like achakal bricks and terracotta roofing
      Anupama Kundoo – Taking Time is the latest instalment in a series of exhibitions titled The Architect’s Studio, curated by Kjeld Kjeldsen and Mette Marie Kallehauge. In each, the aim has been to reveal the process behind the buildings.

      Ten key projects by Indian architect Anupama Kundoo

      “Kundoo tries to return qualitative time to the production of architecture – by human work and human hand, which naturally takes longer than machines but involves a far better sense of materials, detail, space and the building’s relationship to the site,” said the curators.
      “Looking at Kundoo’s buildings, it is impossible not to sense that they are unique works, the epitome of site-specific architecture.”

      There is a full-scale mockup of Kundoo’s affordable housing concept, Full Fill Home
      The exhibition consists of two parts. The first room, called The Architecture of Time, is dedicated to archive material. Here, 13 building models are displayed alongside an assortment of artefacts.
      There are three tables of materials: one featuring a mix of natural stones and wood, one covered in earth (both rammed and fired), and one exploring cement and concrete.
      Also in this room is a model of the Volontariat Homes for Homeless Children, a cluster of dome-shaped housing units made from handmade mud bricks, and Hut Petite Ferme, the first house Kundoo designed for herself.

      Other featured projects include the domed Volontariat Homes for Homeless Children
      The second room, titled Co-creation, hones in on Auroville – the city where Kundoo has been based for the majority of her career, and where many of her buildings are located.
      Here, the focus is on Kundoo’s largest project to date – the 240,000-square-metre housing development, Lines of Goodwill. A large model, along with 1:1 scale material samples, reveals Kundoo’s strategies for environmentally sensitive homes that connect residents to nature.

      The Co-creation room reveals Kundoo’s masterplan for Lines of Goodwill in Auroville
      This is the fourth exhibition that the Louisiana has hosted as part of The Architect’s Studio series, following retrospectives of Chinese architect Wang Shu, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena and Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao.
      “Of course, the whole exhibition series is to do with different cultures,” Kjeldsen previously told Dezeen.
      Anupama Kundoo – Taking Time opened on 8 October and continues until 31 January at the Louisiana Museum. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      Pablo Chiereghin violently destroys and rebuilds furniture for Riot Design exhibition

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      Italian visual artist Pablo Chiereghin has created a series of furniture pieces from the remains of items he destroyed “using a riot aesthetic” for an exhibition at Vienna’s Kunstforum.Named Riot Design, the exhibition consists of a series of reconstructed pieces of furniture and everyday items displayed alongside videos showing Chiereghin destroying the original items.
      “Riot Design is a process through consumerism, violence appeal, design and the market,” explained Chiereghin.
      “Un-personal everyday objects are destroyed and transformed using a riot aesthetic and then brought back to functionality through an invasive restoration,” he told Dezeen.

      The Riot Design exhibition is at Vienna’s Kunstforum.

      Each of the items, chosen for their normality, was destroyed on-site within the gallery, which is in the former vault of the bank that houses the Kunstforum.
      They were then reassembled using construction materials that are usually hidden within items to draw attention to the rebuilding.

      Riot Design consists of destroyed and rebuilt furniture
      “The act of destruction is part of the artwork, violence models and deconstructs the object, leaving left-over pieces which are then to be recomposed in a unique object,” Chiereghin said.
      “The exhibition is conceived as a whole installation which combines objects and videos, changing rhythm through rough sounds and flirty objects, between construction materials and pink moulded plastic.”

      The items were chosen for their normality
      Chiereghin destroyed the items while wearing a helmet or balaclava to make a visual connection to the act of rioting.
      “The combination of the objects and the riot tools was influenced by the destruction result I wanted to obtain and by visual references to the history of riots,” said Chiereghin.
      “The idea of applying violence to things is common, either in everyday life or in the art,” he continued. “Nevertheless, I was for a long time fascinated by the power of exercising violence and the appeal that violence has on human beings.”

      The furniture was destroyed within the exhibition space
      “With the passing of the time I realised I wanted to excerpt the idea of riot and its violence from a context and use it as a cultural, ready-made tool of design,” continued Chiereghin.
      “Destruction activates multilayer connections: damage, hedonistic liberation, loss of value and reaction against status quo.”

      Videos show the items being destroyed
      The exhibition was created after Chiereghin watched lots of footage of riots, including those at the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and the Genova G8 Summit in 2001. The artist also focused on anti-austerity riots in Greece between 2010-2015, along with the recent riots in Hong Kong and USA.

      “As a predominantly white profession, we recognise that we have contributed to this pain”

      He accepts that the subject matter and the title of the exhibition may prove controversial, but hopes that it challenges visitors to ask questions.

      Pablo Chiereghin violently destroyed the pieces
      “If somebody finds it inappropriate, contradictory or speculative they are right,” he said.
      “The project offers a multilayer approach, which goes from entertainment to speculative design and consumerism critics,” he continued.
      “Visitors have possibilities to stay on the level they want but I think I would be happy if some visitors go home with questions.”
      Riot Design is on at the Kunstforumin in Vienna from 15 October to 22 November 2020. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition at The Met celebrates 150 years of fashion

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      Set designer Es Devlin has created two clock-like gallery spaces for the latest fashion exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which compares design over 150 years.The Met’s Costume Institute opens About Time: Fashion and Duration at the museum’s Fifth Avenue location on 29 October –  the original planned opening in May 2020 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
      Featured fashion dates back 150 years to 1870 to coincide with The Met’s 150th anniversary. Rather than presenting designs chronologically, the exhibition mixes up the timeline in order to compare the cyclical nature of fashion across the years.

      Above image: the all-bacl Clock One gallery space. Top image: the mirrored Clock Two gallery space

      “About Time: Fashion and Duration considers the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical,” said The Met director Max Hollein.
      “The result is a show that presents a nuanced continuum of fashion over the museum’s 150-year history.”
      Devlin, who has created stage sets for musicians The Weekend and Katy Perry, worked with The Met’s Design Department to create a time-travelling-themed exhibition.

      White markings or light divide galleries into 60 “minutes”
      It is located in two galleries in the museum’s Iris and B Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall that are in a circular formation like a clock. Called Clock One and Clock Two, they have different material finishes. The former is nearly all black, and the latter is covered in mirrors.
      White markings on the floor or thin white lights punctuate both spaces, resembling the marks on a clock face.
      These marks split the galleries into 60 segments or “minutes”. Each minute showcases two garments – one that follows time chronologically and another from a different time period to showcase similarities or differences in form.

      One of the spaces is covered in mirrors
      Examples include an 1870s black silk faille princess-line dress paired with a 1990s Alexander McQueen skirt and a mid-1890s silk satin dress with puffed sleeves contrasted by 2004 Comme des Garçons ensemble.
      “Fashion is indelibly connected to time,” said Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of The Costume Institute.
      “It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece.”

      It is located in two galleries in the museum’s Iris and B Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall
      There are 125 fashions in the exhibition with a number sourced from The Costume Insitute’s collection. It includes work from well-known contemporary and historic designers and brands like Virgil Abloh, Azzedine Alaïa, Jonathan Anderson, Iris van Herpen, Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood.
      First announced last year, The Met’s About Time exhibition is based on French 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea of time as la durée, or duration – something which can be measured through images but never perceived as a whole.

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      The Met closed its main building on Fifth Avenue, as well as its Met Breuer and Met Cloisters locations, in early March in response to the emergence of outbreaks of coronavirus in New York City.
      In lieu of the spring opening, the museum created a virtual version of About Time: Fashion and Duration on Youtube.

      Garments include this spring/summer 2020 haute couture by Viktor + Rolf
      The annual Costume Institute Benefit, also known as the Met Gala, was due to take place in May 2020 to coincide with the original opening of the exhibition. It was also cancelled due to the pandemic.
      The Met’s Costume Institute organises a spring exhibition every year. Last year’s exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion celebrated the “resurgence of camp”, while the 2018 showcase Heavenly Bodies was themed on religion.
      Others have included a retrospective of Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo, a study of handcraft and machine production and an exploration of China.

      About Time will run from 29 October 2020 to 7 February 2021. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      Connected virtual exhibition sees nine designers craft carbon-negative furniture from hardwoods

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      Dezeen promotion: a range of carbon-negative furniture items created by designers including Ini Archibong and Thomas Heatherwick for London’s Design Museum can now be viewed as part of a permanent virtual exhibition.Jointly commissioned by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), Benchmark Furniture and the Design Museum, the Connected exhibition tasked nine designers with creating a table and seating object for their own home offices.

      Top: Studiopepe’s geometric table and chair. Above: The Connected exhibition was on show at London’s Design Museum
      Designed for their personal use, each designer’s creation was made to suit their new ways of living and working from home as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
      The exhibition aimed to explore how designers and craftspeople have adapted their working methods during lockdown.
      Designers were also invited to record video diaries documenting the process of creating their pieces, which have been compiled and made into a documentary.

      Ini Archibong’s design was informed by the rock formations of The Giant’s Causeway

      Participants included Archibong, who is based in Switzerland, London-based Heatherwick Studio, Jaime Hayon from Spain and Netherlands-based Sabine Marcelis.
      Other designers involved were Maria Bruun, Sebastian Herkner, Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska, Studiopepe and Studio Swine.

      Ini Archibong designs rock-like furniture with its own drainage system

      While Archibong took cues from the undulating rock formations of Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland for his Kadamba Gate table and seating design, Heatherwick Studio created a modular desk with wooden planters for legs.
      The nine furniture pieces were displayed at London’s Design Museum from 11 September to 11 October. The show, which was digitally scanned by V21 Artspace, is now permanently available to view online as a virtual exhibition.

      Thomas Heatherwick designed a table with planters as legs for the Connected project
      Each design was made from a choice of three sustainable American hardwoods: red oak, maple or cherry. According to AHEC, the resulting collection of objects removed more carbon from the atmosphere than they generated.
      “When considered as a group, the Connected designs are better than carbon neutral,” said AHEC. “The total global warming potential (GWP) – often referred to as the ‘carbon footprint’ – of the nine Connected designs is minus 342 kilograms of CO2 equivalent.”

      Heatherwick Studio unveils modular desk with wooden planter legs

      “It takes a little over 10 seconds for the hardwood logs harvested to manufacture all the Connected designs to be replaced by new growth in the US forest,” it continued.
      “The full environmental Life Cycle Assessments on each of the nine projects prove that these pieces are environmentally sound, going beyond carbon neutrality and leaving a negative carbon footprint.”

      Sabine Marcelis designed a work-from-home cubicle with a bright yellow interior for the show
      Details on the exhibition can be found via the Design Museum website, while more information on the work AHEC does can be found on its webpage.

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      Game On's neon-filled exhibition design paid homage to 80s video games

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      Spanish practice Smart & Green Design re-designed the Barbican’s touring Game On exhibition for a former underground cistern in Madrid, using more than 150 LED arches to evoke the neon colours of the 1980s.The retrospective, which is reportedly the largest international exhibition to explore the history of video games, spans more than 400 collector’s objects and drawings covering the birth of the technology in the 1960s to the present day.

      Visitors to the exhibition can play 150 video games
      Alongside this, 150 original video games can be played as part of the show, including early games like Space Invaders and Tetris, classics like Rock Band, Pokemon and The Sims as well as more recent games like Fifa and Wii Sports.
      After touring more than 30 countries including China, the US and Australia, the exhibition came to Madrid between November 2019 and May 2020 courtesy of arts and culture foundation Fundación Canal.

      The LEDs are arranged into colour-coded arches

      Game On’s revamped set-up, which won Smart & Green Design the public vote at this year’s Dezeen Awards in the exhibition design category, relied heavily on multicoloured LED tubes suspended throughout the exhibition space.
      Set against an otherwise dimly lit interior, these nodded to the vector graphics of early video games such as Battle Zone, in which simple lines and curves on a black backdrop were used to create the illusion of three-dimensional spaces.
      LEDs were arranged into colour-coded arches and tunnels to create the impression of architectural elements, demarcating 15 distinct sections and guiding visitors through the exhibition.

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      “The design follows simple geometries and repetitions as some of the most famous video games did,” Smart & Green Design’s founder Fernando Muñoz told Dezeen.
      “These lines created perspectives and the illusion of a 3D space, despite all the elements being two dimensional.”
      Each section was also signposted through a neon sign proclaiming its theme, which was suspended in the air in a nod to the floating score numbers often found in the top corner of a game’s screen.

      Neon signs read the names of the different sections
      The main challenge for the studio was to balance the buzz and excitement of an arcade with the kind of quiet, contemplative spaces needed to take in the archival objects, sketches and the stories behind them.
      For this purpose, Muñoz developed two distinct spatial typologies.
      While stations for playing the games were placed inside of the cistern’s existing 7.5-metre tall brick arches, each illuminated by an LED frame, the remaining exhibits were housed in “lights tunnels”, running perpendicularly to the arches.

      Stations for playing the video games are integrated into the cistern’s existing brick arches
      “We designed several tunnels using rectangular timber frames with lights integrated into them,” said Muñoz.
      “The rhythm of these structures created the feeling of being inside a separate space and they also hold either walls or vitrines to show the contents.”

      The light tunnels run perpendicularly to the existing brick arches (marked in black above)
      To create these walls, the studio opted for sound-absorbing panels, which had the dual benefit of muffling the noise coming from the gaming area outside as well as being easier to reuse for future exhibitions.
      “We try not to use heavy resources like MDF or drywall, which cannot be reused without generating waste and need a lot of energy both in the assembly and disassembly,” said Muñoz.
      “We try to create lightweight systems that are easily assembled and stored and with standardised dimensions so that they can be reused and adapted to any space or design.”

      Walls are integrated into the light tunnels to house information
      In order to offset the high embodied energy of the LEDs, Muñoz designed the lighting system to be modular, with tubes that are either half a metre, one metre or two metres long, so that they can be efficiently stored and repurposed again and again in different constellations.
      This is part of the studio’s wider strategy to try and cut down the amount of waste produced through temporary installations.

      The walls are made of sound-absorbent panels
      “The exhibitions industry is responsible for a huge amount of waste due to the ephemeral condition of its products,” Muñoz explained.
      “We believe that through design and longterm strategies of collaborating with exhibition organisers, waste can be reduced. We have designed our own carbon calculator and tailored protocols to interact with the administration and coordinators in the exhibitions world.”

      The exhibition was on show until May 2020
      Aside from Game On, other exhibition designs shortlisted for Dezeen Awards 2020 include a memorial filled with items that belonged to victims of gun violence and an installation at Fondazione Prada with 1,400 porcelain plates suspended from the walls of a golden room.
      Although the recipients of the public vote have already been determined, the winners of the official Dezeen Awards, judged by a panel of experts including Norman Foster, Michelle Ogundehin and Konstantin Grcic, will not be announced until the end of November.
      The Game On exhibition took place from 29 November 2019 to 31 May 2020 at Madrid’s Castellana 214. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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      Tom Postma Design suspends 1,400 porcelain plates in gold-gilded room at Fondazione Prada

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      A Fondazione Prada exhibition about Chinese export porcelain, designed by Dutch firm Tom Postma Design, was housed within three prefabricated timber volumes clad in velvet and real gold leaf.From January to September 2020, The Porcelain Room installation was staged in one large exhibition space in the OMA-designed Torre annexe.
      The Porcelain Room has been shortlisted for this year’s Dezeen Award in the exhibition design category.

      Above: two of the timber volumes were clad in velvet and one in gold leaf. Top image: the final, golden room housed 1,400 porcelain plates
      Visitors passed through the walk-through volumes within it, tracing the history and legacy of Chinese porcelain in Europe and the Middle East.

      The installation progressed in chronological order, showcasing porcelain pieces dating back to the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century, all the way up to the 19th century.
      After passing through the first two rooms, the climactic highlight of the show was the final, gold-gilded room. Here, 1,400 of the approximately 1,700 porcelain pieces in the exhibition were suspended from the walls and ceiling.

      Porcelain pieces were suspended from the walls and ceiling of the Golden Porcelain Room
      This offered a modern reimagining of the porcelain rooms found in European palaces and aristocratic houses of the time, such as the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin and the Santos Palace in Lisbon.
      Then, China plates and other tableware pieces were used as decorative rather than functional items, arranged into lavish displays that covered most of the visible surfaces including the walls and sometimes even the ceiling like three-dimensional wallpaper.

      The room was a modern interpretation of the royal and aristocratic porcelain rooms of the time
      “These porcelain rooms were the first examples of people using objects designed for a purpose, usually dishes intended for the table, in a completely different way as pieces of a decorative puzzle,” said Jorge Welsh, who curated the exhibition alongside Luísa Vinhais.
      “To bring the original concept into a contemporary context, we designed a dense, abstract pattern in which each piece of porcelain is used rather as if it were a pigment, chosen for its colour and shape, to create a kind of mural that engulfs the exhibition space.”

      Black display cases housed rare made-to-order pieces in the first room
      In contrast to this, the first two volumes were much more muted, covered inside and out in deep brown velvet.
      The introductory room housed some of the first porcelain editions, which were made-to-order for Portuguese and Spanish clients in the 16th and 17th century.
      Of the approximately 150 pieces of this type that remain in the world according to Welsh, 53 were displayed here, set against a deep black backdrop and illuminated by spotlights to allow their rarity to speak for itself.

      The second room showcased tableware shaped like animals, vegetables and fruit
      The second room took the form of a 12-metre long corridor, flanked by display cases on either side that contained later tableware designs, shaped like different animals, vegetables and fruit to cater to Western tastes.
      This passageway led the way into the golden room, with a layout designed in collaboration Welsh and Vinhais, who also co-founded the Jorge Welsh Works of Art gallery.

      The second room acted as a corridor leading into the last
      Using cutouts of each of the hundreds of plates, they created a scale model of the room, which was then transferred into a digital drawing by Tom Postma Design.
      “We checked every single plate and assigned it a unique code, indexing its display position, diameter, typology, the distance from the wall and other data,” Paride Piccinini, an architectural engineer at Tom Postma Design, told Dezeen.
      “Then we attached a life-sized print out of the drawing to the walls in order to drill the supports in exactly the right positions.”

      Welsh and Vinhais designed the pattern using a scale model
      This allowed the team to develop an unobtrusive system of fixings and lighting that kept the overall design clean and minimal.
      “This immersive environment needs effective lighting to able to reach all the pieces in all directions, without blinding the visitors or showing the source of light,” said Piccinini.
      “This issue has been solved with a system of diffused and hidden spotlights, embedded into the walls, the ceiling, the floor and the glass balustrade system.”

      Tom Postma Design developed the reuseable lighting and supports in the Golden Porcelain Room
      The gold gilding, which took a group of artisans five days to apply to the interior and exterior of the volume leaf by leaf, mirrored the colours of the porcelain and reflected light onto the plates from behind.

      Formafantasma designs recyclable displays for Rijksmuseum exhibition

      Aside from the smallest spotlights, the lighting system was developed from reused fixtures from Fondozione Prada’s existing supply. The whole installation was designed to be disassembled and used again.

      Underneath the cladding, the installation consists of modular timber panels
      “The installation is entirely built from timber, with modular panels that can be stored and reused for future exhibitions,” said Piccinini.
      “The metallic supports for the plates, the lighting system, shelves and display cases can also be reused for a similar installation.”
      Other projects nominated for Dezeen Awards include a memorial filled with items that belonged to victims of gun violence and ĒTER’s multi-sensory design for an exhibition about ASMR at ArkDes.
      Photography is by Mark Niedermann.

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      Squashed serpents feature in Polly Morgan's How To Behave At Home exhibition

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      Twisting snakes with iridescent scales squeeze through concrete and polystyrene blocks in How To Behave At Home, the latest exhibition by British taxidermy artist Polly Morgan.The How To Behave At Home exhibition, which looks at themes of societal norms and expectations, comprises a series of sculptures that feature the coiled bodies of taxidermied snakes.  Morgan believes the animal is an apt symbol for the way in which people utilise social media, particularly photo-sharing apps like Instagram.
      “The skins of snakes are alluring, decorating what is essentially a killing and eating machine,” Morgan told Dezeen.
      “These patterns are thought to either camouflage the snake or warn would-be predators away; some non-venomous snakes also mimic the bright colours of poisonous snakes to avoid capture,” she continued.
      “The filters we apply to our social media feeds, either literally or just by our careful selection of one image over another, is done for similar purposes; to allow us to blend in and avoid crowd censure, or to allow a particular perception of us to flourish.”

      Untitled, 2020, by Polly Morgan
      Morgan had a loose idea of what How To Behave At Home’s themes would be from the beginning of this year.

      However, as the coronavirus pandemic hit and millions across the globe were placed under stay-at-home orders, the artist gained a heightened awareness of the disparity between reality and the idealised content presented over social media.
      This influenced the new work that she has created for the exhibition, as well as the selection of older pieces that have been included.
      “Watching the changes in my own and others’ behaviour made me think more clearly about what the work represented and exactly how I wanted it to look,” she explained.
      “I was interested to see how peoples’ Instagram feeds would change, with no parties to attend or events to promote; would they let the veneer slip or turn to a new kind of boastfulness,” Morgan added.
      “I felt celebrities flounder; flaunting their luxurious life was irrelevant and unwelcome and they had to reconfigure their online selves – feeling squeezed and trying to be authentic, my ideas evolved a lot in that period.”

      Untitled, 2020, by Polly Morgan
      Some of the slithering creatures in the exhibition have been given a subtle iridescent coating, which takes cues from the colourful trompe l’oeil effects often seen in nail art.
      Morgan – who has used snakes in several of her previous works – also referenced the appearance of sunbeam snakes, which have shiny, rainbow-like scaling.
      “It struck me that using a highly iridescent snake was the ultimate way to represent the vibrancy of our complex lives,” said Morgan, who experimented with paints, varnishes and nail transfer foils to achieve the final effect.
      “Having used the actual skins of snakes for years they suddenly felt inadequate; once they dry onto the form they lose a lot of colour and all their iridescence,” she continued. “I realised I’d been, literally, hidebound by taxidermy.”
      “Uncharacteristically I went to have my nails done and requested an iridescent finish so I could watch the techniques and learn from them – the fact that nails are everyday veneers fed directly into the work I was producing.”

      Every Other Dance, 2018, by Polly Morgan
      In the majority of the sculptures, the snakes appear as tangled piles squeezed through holes in concrete or polystyrene blocks.
      Polystyrene was specifically chosen to mimic the “accidentally architectural” packaging that Morgan would receive whenever she ordered goods online during the lockdown period of the pandemic.
      “The way these objects were cocooned in these protective forms seemed to parallel our own lives during lockdown, safeguarded in our homes,” she explained.

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      The artist also thought the twisting shape of the snakes reflected how people can shape themselves to adhere to societal expectations.
      “The title of the show, How To Behave At Home, comes from a chapter heading in a Victorian book on etiquette,” Morgan revealed.
      “Etiquette, just like architecture, can encourage us to behave a certain way, to contain our baser instincts and to conform to certain rules,” she added.
      “We no longer have books on etiquette but we do have a new set of social strictures that proliferate online, and I see people contort themselves in every direction in order to avoid censure.”

      Nothing Like Before, 2019, by Polly Morgan
      Polly Morgan is based in London and has been practising sculpture and taxidermy since 2004. The artist’s How To Behave At Home exhibition will be showing at The Bomb Factory in London from 14 October until 2 November 2020.
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