London Design Festival 2015 Medal Winners
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Each year, London Design Festival recognises the contribution made by leading design figures and emerging talents to London and the industry with four London Design Medal awarded:
The London Design Medal: the highest accolade bestowed upon an individual who has distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.
Design Innovation Medal: celebrates entrepreneurship in all its forms, both locally and internationally. It honours an individual for whom design lies at the core of their development and success.
Emerging Design Medal: recognises an impact made on the design scene within five or so years of graduation.
Lifetime Achievement Medal: honours a significant and fundamental contribution to the design industry over the course of a career.
London Design Medal: Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby
Supported by Panerai
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Barber Osgerby were awarded the London Design Medal for the diversity of their work, which derives from architectural background, but expands to a variety of furniture, product and interiors work.
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby founded their eponymous studio in 1996 after graduating with Master’s degrees in Architecture from The Royal College of Art in London. From their first studio in Trellick Tower in London, they designed their first piece, the Loop Table, produced by Isokon in 1997.
Much of Barber and Osgerby’s early work involved the folding and shaping of sheet material, influenced by the white card that they had used frequently in architectural model making. Plywood and perspex were used in the development of the Pilot Table, 1999, and Stencil Screen, 2000. Known for their use of colour, with the limited edition Iris tables, Barber and Osgerby developed a new direction, using colour as the starting point for the work. In 2009, Barber and Osgerby launched their first major commission for Murano glassmakers Venini which resulted in a series of unique, large-scale glass vases, created in limited editions and shown in Milan, Porto Cervo and London.
2010 saw the creation of an experimental installation for Sony at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. Through a series of conceptual objects that exploited Sony’s new sound technologies, a perspective was presented for how electronics could be better integrated within contemporary home interiors. Another investigation, this time into school furniture and how dynamic movement in a chair can aid concentration, resulted in the forward-tilting Tip Ton chair launched with Vitra in 2011. The same year, Barber and Osgerby were appointed to design the London 2012 Olympic Torch.
Emerging Design Medal: Marjan van Aubel
Supported by Swarovski
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The 2015 Swarovski Emerging Talent Medal went to Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel, the creator of glassware, a table and a stained glass window that all generate energy from sunlight. Marjan van Aubel is a designer of materials and objects whose practice spans the fields of science and chemistry.
She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art Design Products (MA) and the Rietveld Academy (BA) DesignLAB. Her research process blends scientific precision with sensory responsiveness to develop aesthetic solutions for the future. Van Aubel’s objects make tangible the potential of technology and energy harvesting for the benefit of the living environment. At the heart of her collection is a series of innovative materials, from foam porcelain to integrated solar cells based on the properties of colour. Intuitive and inquisitive, she believes interdisciplinary practice is the way forward for design.
Van Aubel has collaborated with scientists, designers and manufacturers including Solaronix, The American Hardwood Export Council and Joris Laarman. She has exhibited at world-class institutions such the Victoria and Albert Museum, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum and the Design Museum in London, where she has been nominated for the Design of the Year Awards twice; in 2013 and 2015. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Vitra Design Museum and MoMA New York. She won the First Prize Dutch DOEN/Materiaalprijs in 2012, the ARC13 Chair Award and the Kortrijk Interieur Award in 2014. She was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Material Innovation Award in 2014.
Design Innovation Medal: Peter Brewin and Will Crawford
Supported by PHC
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The PCH Design Innovation Medal was won by UK-based Peter Brewin and Will Crawford, who invented a cement-impregnated fabric called Concrete Canvas. Concrete Canvas Ltd was established in 2005 to develop and commercialise the award-winning Concrete Canvas Shelters. Concrete Canvas and Concrete Canvas Shelters were developed to exploit a unique material technology invented by Peter Brewin (MEng) and Will Crawford (MEng) whilst studying Industrial Design Engineering at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art in London.
Concrete Canvas Ltd’s core material technology enables the supply of unique construction solutions that are extremely fast, easy to install and environmentally friendly. The company prides itself on innovation, quality and responsiveness to customers’ needs. The primary markets for Concrete Canvas Ltd are in the civil infrastructure (road and rail), mining and petrochemical sectors where CC is used for erosion control applications such as channel lining, slope protection, bund lining and concrete remediation.
Concrete Canvas has won multiple awards, most recently three Chamber of Commerce Awards, including Welsh Business of the Year along with a Lloyds Bank National Business, Samsung Innovation Award 2017. Concrete Canvas has grown rapidly since 2005 and is now providing material to customers in over 80 countries around the world.
Lifetime Achievement Medal: Sir Ken Adam
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2015's Lifetime Achievement Medal was bestowed upon Sir Ken Adam, the German-born British motion picture production designer most famous for his set designs for the James Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s. Production designer Sir Ken Adam emigrated to Britain in 1934 and trained as an architect at University College London and Bartlett School of Architecture. During the war he served as a fighter pilot for the RAF. By coincidence he was engaged to do designs for a film after the war. As a result, he collaborated with outstanding designers, like Oliver Messel, and well-known directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, Jacques Tourneur and István Szabó.
Adam’s name is primarily associated with the design of the James Bond films. Hi witty, inventive, high-gloss sets bore his handwriting from the beginning. He was responsible for the design of a total of seven Bond films, for which he concocted ever more lavish and eye-catching sets as the success and budgets for the series rocketed. He also had a very productive association with Stanley Kubrick on Dr Strangelove... (1963), with its gleaming and sinister war room, and on the contrastingly mellow Technicolor beauties of Barry Lyndon (1975), for which he won an Oscar. Adam was also responsible for the design of impressive films like the sumptuous biopic, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (d. Ken Hughes, 1960), the Cold War thriller The Ipcress File (d. Sidney J.Furie, 1965), the fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (d. Hughes, 1968), and the musical Goodbye, Mr Chips (d. Herbert Ross, 1969).
In later life, he worked mostly on American films, including In and Out (US, d. Frank Oz, 1997). In total, Ken Adam worked on 90 film projects, two opera productions, a multimedia project and diverse exhibitions over the course of more than fifty years. He has received a great number of prestigious honors and awards, including the British Academy Film Award, six Academy Award nominations and two award-winning Oscars.
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