Sweden’s capital has just signed off on its celebration of local furniture and creativity, Stockholm Design Week, for another year. Since 2002, the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair has been held to coincide with Design Week, expanding the fair further with installations, exhibitions and design discussions.
The Glass Elephant exhibition at Stockholm Design Week.
Image: Simon Klenell
One result of collaboration betwee the two events this year was the Glass Elephant installation, curated in the subterranean Skeppsholmen Caverns. This grotto-like tunnel, initially dug for military use during World War II, has become an exhibition space for the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. With its lack of natural light, the setting inspired designers to play with glass in order to emphasise the existing space and add what wasn’t already there – windows and light. There were robots of elephantine proportions, and other grandiose objects made from Gossamer glass. The ‘elephants’ entertained by holding up mirrors to show off the glass objects, cleaning them with feather dusters and spotlighting them.
Detail of Oki Sato’s installation, constructed from over 100 pieces of lasercut foam sheets.
Image: Karl Gabor
Another highlight was the lounge in the entrance to the exhibition designed by the international Guest of Honour at the fair, Oki Sato, founder of Nendo. Sato first exhibited his work almost 10 years ago at Greenhouse, the place for up-and-coming designers at the fair, after taking his prototype chair on the plane to Stockholm with him because he had no budget to ship it. That first visit led to Sato getting his chair produced and signalled the start of his professional career. Now, as Guest of Honour he produced another impressive work, lasercutting more than 100 plastic foam sheets and transforming them into “a landscape that expresses how the design process begins and evolves, from a simple idea to a finished expression,” explains Sato.
Lamps by Form Us With Love.
Image: Jonas Lindström
Of the myriad furniture and lighting exhibits during the fair, a favourite was the young studio collective Form Us With Love (FUWL), who kicked off Design Week with a less industry-focused, public pop-up market. Located in Stockholm’s buzzing shopping district, Bibliotekstan, FUWL staged an exhibition as well as a curated shop offering a selection of 30 accessories, lights, furniture, books and magazines available to purchase from the market itself or online until the end of February.
