Creative minds on the lookout for intriguing ideas inspired by the world of interior design, will certainly find plenty of inspirations at the London Design Festival (15th – 23rd September 2018).
Fans of architecture, parametric design and modern geometries will be happy to know that the Zaha Hadid Gallery is presenting during the London event the new RE/Form carpet collection, a collaboration between hospitality carpet manufacturer Royal Thai and Zaha Hadid Design.
The collection features 22 designs inspired by four themes and motifs that are considered as an integral part of Zaha Hadid's work – so there are striated lines, ribbon-like projections, pixelated landscapes and organic cellular shapes, translated into Axminster-loomed and hand-tufted designs.
The patterns are layered and interwoven, while their colours – vivid shades of turquoise, red and green – introduce new nuances to Royal Thai's commercial carpets.
Connoisseurs of Zaha Hadid's architectures will undoubtedly manage to spot in the carpets included in the "Striation" theme the confluence of lines and the geometric complexity of the urban grid of the Rome-based MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, with galleries and corridors creating multiple major and minor streams.
The "Ribbon" theme is a flat interpetation of the "Thallus" structure, originally presented in 2017 at Milan Design Week, and created employing automated additive manufacture technology.
The "Cellular" series combines architecture with science and the colourful three-dimensional cell-like hexagonal honeycomb motifs replicated on a black background evoke the jewels Hadid designed for Swiss goldsmiths Caspita and the cells carved on the KAPSARC (King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre).
The "Pixels" carpets are dedicated instead to the fans of the digital world, even though there is a strong architectural twist here as well since the geometries replicated on the designs are borrowed from the Nanjing International Youth Cultural Centre and from the façade of the 11-storey 520 West 28th residential building, the first project by Zaha Hadid Architects in New York, located near the High Line.
These may not be legendary flying carpets, but you can easily imagine Zaha Hadid's designs being replicated on a runway carpet for a prominent fashion week sometime in the near future (you can definitely imagine some of these designs in a Dries Van Noten runway).
During the London Design Festival, the Zaha Hadid Gallery will also present the new 2018 Zaha Hadid Design Collection, together with Zaha Hadid Architects' recent collaboration of 3D-printed furniture with Nagami as well as an exhibition by the studio's Computation and Design research group (ZHCODE), showcasing the ideas and technologies transforming the way we imagine, design and build our cities.
