Prime 10 design tales of 2024
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Replicate on a yr of trailblazing design with a glance again on the high ten design tales of 2024 – as chosen by you, the readers. Wallpaper* journal’s most-read design tales of the yr level to thrilling firsts, like David Lynch’s debut set up at Salone del Cellular, and Patricia Urquiola and Kvadrat’s upholstery textile produced from 100 per cent ocean-bound plastic. There are additionally collaborative triumphs, corresponding to Rimowa and La Marzocco’s new espresso machine; and the celebration of a design traditional, the Rubik’s Dice.
Prime 10 design tales of 2024
Patricia Urquiola and Kvadrat’s sustainable upholstery
(Picture credit score: Neil Godwin at Future Studios for Wallpaper*)
Named Greatest Recycled Materials on the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2024, Patricia Urquiola’s Sport textile for Kvadrat was a collaboration with Swiss firm #tide and is the world’s first upholstery textile made from 100 per cent ocean-bound plastic.
The post-consumer plastic used is collected inside 10km of the shoreline of Thailand, as a part of #tide’s dedication to stop the supplies from reaching the oceans.
The ensuing sportswear-inspired cloth options refined tactile patterns enriching the floor and a color palette outlined by vibrant shades of purple, inexperienced and blue, in addition to a collection of neutrals.
Author: Rosa Bertoli
Design Dynasties: the powerhouse households of Italian furnishing
(Picture credit score: Bea De Giacomo)
Wallpaper* met with eight Italian households who, technology after technology, have set the requirements of furnishings design throughout the globe. These ‘Design Dynasties‘ generously shared the private tales and experiences behind their success with our author Laura Could Todd. They spoke of their longest-serving items and the dynamics which have emerged from being each a household and a enterprise. By way of her pictures, Bea de Giacomo captures glimpses of their familial settings and their most cherished designs.
Author Laura Could Todd
A brand new period for Iittala
(Picture credit score: Company Leroy)
‘Imperfect’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘unpredictable’ aren’t phrases typically related to Finnish design, least of all with Iittala, one among its founding fathers. However new inventive director Janni Vepsäläinen shouldn’t be afraid to make use of all three and apply them to the 143-year-old firm. Iittala now hails a brand new period, led by Vepsäläinen, and marked by a brand new emblem and collections that pay homage to Aino and Alvar Aalto’s heritage.
Throughout Stockholm Furnishings Truthful 2024, Vepsäläinen unveiled her first assortment, inside a former nuclear reactor within the metropolis. It wasn’t your common debut; London-based composer and artist Damsel Elysium carried out a chunk utilizing glass ‘devices’, starting from 2m-long horns to bells and bottles, all hand-blown within the Iittala manufacturing unit close to Helsinki.
Author: Emma O’Kelly
Ikea and Uncooked Shade’s vibrant crafts
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Ikea and Uncooked Shade)
‘Tesammans’ means ‘collectively’ or ‘in firm’ in English. It is usually the title of the newest collaboration between Ikea and Uncooked Shade, a studio based mostly in Eindhoven and based by Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar. The gathering is stuffed with playful designs, vibrant textures and an eye catching color palette.
Ikea’s inventive transient to the pair was direct but liberating – reveal the potential of the spectrum. ‘Uncooked Shade possesses a particular grasp of color’s efficiency, its emotional affect, and its function in shaping our residing environments,’ Maria O’Brian, inventive Chief at Ikea of Sweden instructed us. ‘We intention for this assortment to spark creativity and empower people to craft vibrant and cheerful residing areas of their every day routines.’
Author: Yoko Choy
David Lynch presents ‘A Pondering Room’ at Salone del Cellular
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of David Lynch and Salone del Cellular)
Guests to Salone del Cellular 2024 had been supplied a brand new cinematic expertise. The revered director David Lynch – identified for cult movies like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Wild at Coronary heart – designed an exhibition entitled ‘Interiors by David Lynch. A Pondering Room’ on the grounds of the Rho Fiera. The exhibition marked a brand new type of enterprise for the Oscar-winning auteur, however based on its curator, Antonio Monda, former creative director of the Rome Movie Competition, it got here not completely out of the blue.
‘A couple of years earlier I introduced Lynch the lifetime achievement award on the Rome Movie Competition, and after I visited him in Los Angeles I discovered him sharpening a desk. I requested him, what are you doing? And he instructed me he designs furnishings now,’ recounts Monda. ‘So when the Salone del Cellular invited me to fee a filmmaker for this particular occasion, I knew he was the true deal.’
Author Laura Could Todd
Rimowa and La Marzocco’s compact espresso machine
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Rimowa and La Marzocco)
Rimowa, globally identified for its premium baggage, united with La Marzocco, an knowledgeable in espresso equipment, to current a fastidiously crafted Linea Mini espresso machine celebrating German and Italian design and engineering.
Merging Rimowa’s signature grooved aluminium with La Marzocco’s engineering, the Linea Mini is a compact design accessorised with bespoke compartments, and packs an inventive punch together with your morning shot of espresso.
Ido Yoshimoto’s sculptural items
Ido Yoshimoto’s workshop in Inverness, California
(Picture credit score: Images: Brian Flaherty. Artwork course: Michael Reynolds)
We visited sculptor Ido Yoshimoto at his California studio, the place he spoke about his work with wooden, from his starting as an arborist to his sculptures and furnishings made with native reclaimed materials – whether or not salvaged cedar, walnut or cypress, or old-growth redwood downed by catastrophe.
For Yoshimoto, making artwork is a means to determine how issues work, and repair what’s damaged. Typically it’s simply repairing an previous pepper grinder or cleansing a fish. But it surely’s additionally about residing as nature, not with nature, an expression of curiosity and connection. Making artwork makes the world really feel much less mysterious as a result of it’s tinkering in its highest kind.
Author: Shonquis Moreno
50 years of the Rubik’s Dice
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Ernő Rubik)
Hidden away in Budapest’s Buda Hills stands Hungarian inventor Ernő Rubik’s minimalist five-storey abode. Adorned with a number of scenic terraces, it stars an elevator that conveniently glides between ranges and furnishings of Rubik’s personal design. ‘Sure, I made different issues, too,’ he instructed Wallpaper* on a tour via his snug rooms, ‘however individuals solely wish to speak concerning the dice.’
The dice, in fact, is the Rubik’s Dice, the bestselling 3D mixture puzzle that the inventor dreamed up again in 1974. Twisting and turning into some 43 quintillion permutations, the six-sided dice is clad in vibrantly tinted squares that beckon enthusiastic drawback solvers.
Fifty years after its beginning, we spoke with Rubik concerning the historical past of a design traditional.
Author Alia Akkam
Air Play Moon Safari
(Picture credit score: Antoine Jorel & Pierre Claude)
Whereas the ‘Air Play Moon Safari’ tour was in full swing throughout Europe, the USA and Mexico throughout 2024 (they’re taking part in 2025 dates too), we explored the design of the French band’s White Field stage. They performed their intimate, retro-futurist traditional album, in full, from a five-sided, white-walled, 21:9 aspect-ratio letterbox that confronted its voyeuristic audiences like Hitchcock’s Rear Window property as reimagined by Californian modernists. ‘It could possibly be a house, it could possibly be our world, our head… our architectural idea,’ they mentioned of the undertaking.
Author Simon Mills
Designing the Olympics
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Paris 2024)
How do you start to design the Olympics? On the eve of this yr’s occasion, we pulled up a pew with Joachim Roncin, the director of design for Paris 2024, to be taught extra about gender-free mascots with a genital likeness and medals produced from the Eiffel Tower.
This had been a five-year project with a sprawling, impossibly broad scope, a tough deadline, a worldwide viewers and – ideally – a optimistic legacy that can span generations of future residents. The warmth was actual.
Author Hugo Macdonald
