With over 300 events taking place as part of this year's London Design Festival, there is no getting away from the scale and brilliance of the capital's most important week for design. Nothing emphasised this more than the opening reception held, as always at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Raphael Gallery showcases Raphael's seven surviving tapestry designs commissioned by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel. In to this celestial space, Adrian van Hooydonk, Director of Design for BMW Group [and apparent advocate for using a pencil a fashion accessory; check out his pocket] introduces us to Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby's awe-inspiring 'Precision & Poetry in Motion'. Two gigantic chrome aerofoils that slowly and independently rotate in the cathedral like hall.
Reflecting, distorting, and almost brushing the priceless artworks owned by the Queen [and also the heads of the guests beneath it!], the superstructure was assembled entirely on site and precariously swings from a superstructure that seems too dainty to support it. Make no mistake, if BMW's name wasn't firmly attached to the project I wouldn't have have stood anywhere near the gigantic flattening irons of doom; no matter how much the Belle Epoque flowed. Without doubt however one of the finest things I've seen in a museum since Brancusi's Bird in Space landed at the V&A in 2003. See it. See it *right* now.
