London Design Biennale has opened on June 1st, 2023, at Somerset House, bringing together participants from around the world to celebrate new forms of international cooperation through design. The Biennale, now in its fourth edition, will display more than 40 installations focused on the theme ‘The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations,’ chosen by this year’s Artistic Director, the Nieuwe Instituut, Instituut, led by Aric Chen. In addition to the national participants, the Eureka exhibition will showcase cross-disciplinary innovations from UK’s leading research centers.
The Biennale’s public program began with an opening keynote from Japanese architect and humanitarian Shigeru Ban, continuing with a series of talks, workshops, screenings, and performances. The Humanitarian Pavilion will also showcase the architect’s Paper Partition System, employed in emergency situations to provide privacy and dignity for the refugees housed in large open spaces. Other interventions are also focused on designing for humanitarian collaborations, including Poland’s project of redistributing the UK’s salvaged windows to Ukraine and the Bidi Bidi Bidi Music & Arts Centre addressing the needs of refugees in northern Uganda.
The overarching theme of this edition proposes an understanding of design as a collaborative practice, inviting participants to explore the importance of collaboration across boundaries and disciplines. Read on to discover three installations created by architects presented during the London Design Biennale.
Bidi Bidi Music & Arts Centre in Uganda / Hassell, Arup
The London Arts Biennale has dedicated a pavilion to the Bidi Bidi Music & Arts Centre in Uganda's Bidi Bidi refugee settlement. The pavilion aims to reframe the narrative around the word ‘refugee’ by showcasing the unique process behind the construction of the Bidi Bidi Music & Arts Centre building, currently under construction in northern Uganda. The project is developed by to.org and designed by Hassel in partnership with Arup. Upon completion, the center will provide space for creative expression, training, and performance in Africa’s largest refugee settlement, currently the home of over 270,000 refugees who have fled violence in neighboring South Sudan.
The word refugee should refer to a status, not an individual’s entire identity. We regularly see demeaning rhetoric around the existence of displaced people. When words are used to ‘other’ the most vulnerable among us, we have a shared responsibility to reclaim and reframe those words. - Nachson Mimran, Co-founder & Creative Executive Officer of to.org.
Ephemeral by PLP Architecture and the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation has partnered with PLP Architecture to create a prototype home with flexible wooden partition walls. Presented at the London Design Biennale London’s Somerset House, the structure aims to be a cost-effective and sustainable solution for the changing needs of residents throughout their lives. To ensure this flexibility, the partition walls are created to be foldable and movable, empowering people to reconfigure the interior spaces. The flexible wooden partitions are built from engineered wood with a technique called kerfing, enabling them to bend without breaking.
Self-assembly and modular furniture have improved so many people’s lives. We’ve developed something similar but for walls so people can take total control of their interior spaces. - Ana Gatóo, lead Cambridge researcher
Inner Peace by Foster + Partners and Royal College of Art
Foster + Partners has collaborated with MA Textiles student Amelia Peng from the Royal College of Art and musicians and composers from the Royal College of Music to create an installation that combines smart textiles with musical performance. Titled Inner Peace, the installation takes the shape of a textile waterfall flowing from the Nelson Stair in Somerset House. Live musical performances are scheduled throughout the biennale, during which musicians will wear a headset that illustrates music’s effect on the brain. Foster + Partners’ Specialist Modelling Group has developed data programming that converts brain waves into movement and color, which are integrated into the textile through the integrated optic fiber.
