We Made This

China Design Now

China Design Now opened recently at the V&A, so we made our way over there this weekend to check it out.

The show is divided into three sections, each representing one of China's major cities: Shenzhen (population: 10 million; average age: 27), Shanghai and Beijing. Each of those sections loosely represents a particular area of design, so that the Shenzhen section mainly features graphic design, Shanghai is all about fashion, and Beijing gets busy with lots of new architecture (much of it by some familiar western names).

Given the staggeringly vast subject the show is covering, it can naturally only offer an itsy-bitsy little taster; but if you view it as just that, it does its job brilliantly.

And there's some great stuff in the gift shop. We picked up a Hi Panda vinyl toy by Shirtflag (that's its box up top).

The show runs until 13 July.

Designs of the Year

The new Brit Insurance Designs of the Year show started last week at the Design Museum, taking over from where the old Designer of the Year show left off in 2006. We went along on Saturday to take a look, and we'll tell you all about that in just a moment.

But first, a gentle rant.

The show is, as you can hardly have failed to notice, sponsored by Brit Insurance. They've stuck their name right in front of it. The awards that go with the show are sponsored by them too. They're called the Brit Insurance Design Awards. And frankly, that's just rubbish. Instead of being mutually beneficial, it's mutually detrimental. It makes the Design Museum look cheap, happy to bend over, grab its ankles and get its elegantly shaped butt branded by its corporate master; and it makes Brit Insurance look greedy and egomaniacal. Instead of making the event and awards the most important thing, they've made their sponsorship the important thing. And that doesn't make us like them much.

This is a grim trend that's been happening wherever sponsorship occurs (Carling Academy anyone?). Don't get us wrong, it's a very good thing that corporate sponsorship exists. It makes stuff happen, in bigger and better ways than would otherwise be possible. But, please, let's restore some sense of modesty, elegance and sophistication to the way it's done. Wouldn't the Designs of the Year show, as supported by Brit Insurance, sound far better? Patronage, not prostitution*.

Rant over.

The show itself is a great mix of work arranged by discipline: Architecture, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Interactive, Product and Transport. You might question some of the entries, but it's a really valuable opportunity to see what's being going on across the design spectrum in the past year. It's also great to be able to play with some of the entries, including the Nintendo Wii, Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori's TENORI-ON digital musical instrument, and Ross Phillips' Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above, being used by some kids in a much looser way than intended).

In the graphics section, we were particularly pleased to see the Butt Book nominated - it's a compendium of Butt Magazine (that link is not at all safe if you're at work), designed by Jop van Bennekom, and we've noticed it being the 'inspiration' for rather a lot of work recently.

Winners in each section, and one overall winner, will be announced in March.

* The fact that Peter Saville's "THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES AT THIS ADDRESS" sticker is one of the graphics entries feels deeply ironic.

Richard Rogers + Architects

While we were out in Paris just before Christmas, we managed to make some time to see the retrospective of architect Richard Rogers (and his practice) that's currently on show at the Centre Pompidou.

And damn, we're glad we did. It's a fantastic show.

Normally architecture exhibitions leave us a bit cold: you're just looking at little models of the buildings, rather than experiencing them for yourself. But this show takes place in one of Rogers' most famous creations, and it makes the whole thing come alive. Here's a bit from the exhibition guide:

Thanks to the three glass facades of the Galerie Sud, the exhibition is open to the city and visible from the street, respecting in this the basic principle of the builiding that Rogers designed with Renzo Piano. On the fourth side the only solid wall offers a comprehensive chronological presentation of 40 years of professional activity, taking in hundreds of projects and completed buildings. The 50 or so projects selected for the exhibition itself are presented on tables, abundant natural light being supplemented by that from the fittings designed by Rogers' practice.

The exhibits are grouped into key architectural themes, and there are a huge number of incredibly detailed models; including Lloyds of London, the Bordeaux Law Courts, the Leadenhall Building and Terminal 4 at Madrid Barajas airport. One in particular stopped us in our tracks - a fantastic model of the (unrealised) masterplan for the development of the Lu Jia Zui district of Shanghai, which lit up to show huge amounts of information. That's a terrible description. Here's a picture instead:

In the middle of the exhibition there's a large (and very pink) soft seating area, where you can lounge about and read a selection of books about Rogers' work.

We left with a much better understanding of his buildings, and a real sense of respect for the practice as a whole.

If you get the chance, do make the trip. You won't be disappointed.

The way we live now

So, cheerio to 2007, and hey there 2008, how you doing?

With the predictable glut of articles and features about the year ahead currently littering every magazine and newspaper you pick up, kudos to The Guardian for deciding to run with a pre-emptive review of the noughties, and particularly so for designing the article (in the G2 section) so beautifully. We highly recommend you nip out and pick up a copy.

We wanted to link out to the whole feature from here, but interestingly the Guardian Unlimited website has chopped it up into separate segments, and has also somehow forgotten to provide a link to it from their homepage.

Which is odd.

But as such, it rather neatly demonstrates how print media can still do some stuff far better than online media. Don't get us wrong, we love the Guardian site; but it can't (yet) present an article with the same pace and elegance as the newspaper.

For those of you who can't get your hands on a copy, here are links to the elements of the feature:
The way we live now
The event
The face
The meal
The look
The soundtrack
The celebrity
The building
The fertility panic
The art
The book
The internet
The big Melt
The TV
The Superpower

And here's hoping that the parts of the Guardian site still wearing their old clothes (as all the articles above are) soon switch into their shinier threads. (Compare and contrast: the soundtrack article above in old clothes and in new clothes.)

People will always need plates

Our friends over at People will always need plates have freshened up their site with some lovely new bits and bobs. Perfect timing if you fancy ordering up some sublimely elegant Christmas gifts. (And who's to say those gifts can't be for yourself?)

Typographic cities

We were wandering about the web today, and passed by Michael Surtees rather lovely DesignNotes blog, in which he'd just posted about the Typographic Walking Tour of New York that he'd done on Saturday.

It was organised by Tobias Frere-Jones from type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones, using the research he'd done for their wonderful typeface Gotham, which is based on American architectural signage.

Surtees has a fantastic Flickr set from the tour, and there are links to other sets on the H&FJ blog.

Deep yumminess. (And it reminded us of the Public Lettering walk that Phil Baines put together a few years back.)

Hmm. Wonder how much a flight to NYC is right now...

An Oliver Jeffers themed weekend

We're creatures of habit here at We Made This, so the weekend found us making our way down to London's southbank for a bit of food and culture.

We kicked off at Borough Market. If you're ever down that way round lunchtime, make sure you find the place that does the chicken wraps - they're utterly delicious. And go rather well with a Berry Bliss smoothie.

We then ambled down to the Tate Modern for their Global Cities show, which you can still catch if you get along there in the next couple of weeks (it runs till 27 August). It's a fascinating show, though it was the historical and sociological stuff that really got us going, rather than the art pieces.

While there, we browsed through the Tate bookshop, which is always a box of delights, and picked up The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers. It's a truly wonderful kids book, a perfect combination of a great story and stunning illustrations; it reminded us of Dave McKean's The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, which is high praise round these parts.

Sunday then found us meeting some friends at the Design Museum, which is currently showing an interesting Zaha Hadid show, and a huge exhibition of Jonathan Barnbrook's work. We're not massive fans of Barnbrook's style (it's just too damn hectic for our simple tastes), but his dedication to creating design with a social conscience is brilliant.

In the cafe there's also a small exhibition of the Blanka posters created for the 50th Anniversary of Helvetica, and our favourite is the one by... Oliver Jeffers.

We headed back along the southbank having been tipped off that Stormtroopers had been seen outside County Hall.

They're there as part of the Star Wars show (careful, noisy link) that's on at the moment. We didn't linger, as that whole particular bit of the southbank is a grim tourist trap (which is a massive shame considering how wonderful the section by the Royal Festival Hall is). But, if we had gone into the show, we would have seen yet another bit of Jeffers' work, in the form of his customised Darth Vader helmet for Toys R Evil.

Oliver Jeffers, Lord of Southbank: we love you.

Leonardo da Vinci at the V&A

It was a bit of a weekend of South Kensington fun (see below), as we headed back there on Sunday to check out the Leonardo da Vinci show on at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The show is a collection of his drawings from his notebooks, grouped into four loose themes. It's not a huge show, but there's a fair amount to get through, and it's all fantastic.

You can't help but think, particularly in our vacuous celebrity-obsessed times, that here is a guy who deserves real adoration. Architect, scientist, painter, thinker, general all-round genius; his sketchbook pages themselves are works of art, despite quite evidently being working drawings.

The show runs till 7 January. Go get some inspiration.

(Image © V&A)

RIBA Stirling Prize 2006

The great and the good of British architecture got together over the weekend for the awarding of the annual Stirling Prize.

The six shortlisted projects were the Brick House by Caruso St John Architects, the Evelina Children's Hospital by Hopkins Architects, the Idea Store in Tower Hamlets by Adjaye/Associates, the National Welsh Assembly by Richard Rogers, the New Area Terminal at Barajas Airport in Madrid, again by Richard Rogers, and the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg by Zaha Hadid.

And, the prize goes to... Richard Rogers for the New Area Terminal. It' s an impressive building, though essentially a giant shed; we would have gone for Zaha Hadid's revolutionary design for the Phaeno Science Centre (shown above). It's a simply stunning building which rewrites the way architecture works, and is seriously tempting us to make a weekend trip to Wolfsburg.

Check out the Channel 4 site here, and the RIBA site here. The exhibition of the shortlisted buildings continues at RIBA's headquarters until 25 November.

(Photograph © Helene Binet)

China Power Station: Part I

Seems you can hardly turn a corner in London without bumping into a power station full of art (see below).

After the success of the Tate Modern at Bankside, the Serpentine Gallery has decided to get in on the act, and has created its first major off-site project, with an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at Battersea Power Station.

China Power Station: Part I is the first part of a three part show (Part II is in Oslo next year, and Part III in Beijing in 2008). The show is mainly video art, with a few installation pieces thrown in; but frankly, the real star of the show is the iconic building itself.

We headed over there yesterday afternoon to take a look. You need to pre-book tickets (here), and you get given a time slot to turn up. We got there at the start of our time slot, which meant just a short wait - a couple of hours later the queue was stretching right around the building.

It's an invaluable chance to get a proper look at the place before the developments start, and it really is quite stunning, feeling a lot like the ageing skeleton of a once great beast. We can't help feeling that it should perhaps just be left as it is, as a memorial to the excesses of the industrial age.

(More shots here)