LIQUID MARBLE BY MATHIEU LEHANNEUR
The third installation of French multi-disciplinary designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s Liquid Marble series, the piece was designed specifically for the Norfolk House Music Room, which was displayed during the Festival in the V&A’s British Galleries, Room 52. The complexities of water motion were captured using sophisticated 3D software developed for the film industry and a single block of marble was then machined and hand polished to create a reflective surface. Viewers were invited to enter into a meditative state as the reflection of light on the polished marble creates a realistic, yet static, representation of the ocean’s movement.

BELOVED
Istanbul-based architecture firm Tabanlıoglu Architects brought Sabahattin Ali’s classic 1943 novel Madonna in a Fur Coat to life on the bridge over the V&A’s Medieval & Renaissance Galleries. The evocative installation, titled Beloved, took the form of a 13-metre-long mirrored black box on the bridge. Visitors could peer inside through cracks in the surface of the enclosure to see atmospheric scenes from the novel re-created using cinematic techniques, physical objects, text, light and sound.

V&A MUSEUM OF DUNDEE VARIOUS DESIGNERS
Ahead of opening in 2018, the creative team behind the development of V&A Museum of Design Dundee used the London Design Festival 2016 to showcase the current strengths of contemporary Scottish design talent and production. Rich, bold and confident, Scotland’s design creativity is making an ever greater impact. Featuring the work of designers who built their career Scotland, Northern Lights encompassed a range of designers from a variety of fields, including fashion, furniture, interiors, product and jewelry.

V&A ENGINEERING SEASON VARIOUS DESIGNERS
The V&A Engineering Season coincided with London Design Festival and highlighted the importance of engineering in our daily lives, viewing engineers as the ‘unsung heroes’ of design, who play a vital and creative role in the creation of our built environment. A newly-commissioned installation by experimental architect Achim Menges with Moritz Dörstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer, was situated in the Museum’s John Madejski Garden. Their first ever public commission in the UK, Elytra Filament Pavilion explored the impact of emerging robotic technologies on architectural design, engineering and making. The Pavilion grew and evolved over the course of the V&A Engineering Season in response to data on structural behaviour and patterns of inhabitation of the Garden that is captured by real-time sensors in its canopy fibres.

The first major retrospective of the most influential engineer of the 20th century, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design continues to run at the V&A, and focuses on the design philosophy of Ove Arup, the pioneer of a multidisciplinary approach to design that has defined the way engineering is understood and practiced today.