London Design Festival returns for the 16th year in 2018, celebrating 10 years at the V&A as the official Festival hub. London will be transformed with an inspiring programme of landmark projects, installations and events from 15-23 September 2018.
London Design Festival’s vision is to celebrate and promote London as the design capital of the world. In 2017, the Festival welcomed a record-breaking 450,000 individual visitors from over 75 countries. These visitors contributed to an overall 991,000 visits to London Design Festival events with 150,000 people passing through Broadgate each day having the opportunity to see Landmark Project Villa Walala. In addition, London Design Festival helped drive a total of 173,250 visits to the V&A over the Festival period with 22% of those surveyed saying they had never visited the museum before and were driven there by the Festival. Flynn Talbot’s Reflection Room and Ross Lovegrove’s Transmission installations were particularly popular.
London Design Festival will launch a series of city-wide commissions and installations. Returning for their fifth London Design Festival is The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), with a playful, ambitious and immersive Tulipwood structure, which will be the first installation ever to be located in the new Sackler Courtyard at the V&A.
MULTIPLY - Waugh Thistleton Architects, supported by The American Hardwood Export Council and Arup
London Design Festival has collaborated with Waugh Thistleton Architects, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) and ARUP to create MultiPly, an interactive modular maze-like installation in The Sackler Courtyard at the V&A, that will encourage visitors to re-think the way homes and cities are designed and built. This pavilion will delve into two of the current global challenges - housing and climate change - and will present the fusion of modular systems and a responsible choice of materials as a vital solution.
This three-dimensional permeable structure will be built out of a re-usable panel system made with 60 cubic metres of American Tulipwood, and it will explore ways in which modular architecture can be developed and enjoyed. “The structure will lead people a merry dance up and down staircases and across bridges exploring space and light,” says architect Andrew Waugh. “The experience will provide previously unseen framed glimpses of the V&A and the courtyard below.”
