May 2012

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ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | May 2012 | the most comprehensive archives of architecture and designICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | May 2012 | the most comprehensive archives of architecture and design

Diary editor: Riya Patel \| riya@icon-magazine.co.uk


Bauhaus: Art as Life	Clerkenwell Design Week	O'Donnell and Tuomey's redesign
Barbican Art Gallery, London	Various venues, London	The Photographers' Gallery, London
3 May 2012 – 12 August 2012	22-24 May 2012	19 May 2012
The biggest UK exhibition on the Bauhaus in more than 40 years is opening at the Barbican this month. Tracing the life of the world's most famous modern art and design school, from its founding in 1919 throughout its 14-year history, the exhibition celebrates the spirit and visionary work of masters such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. www.barbican.org.uk	Clerkenwell Design Week is in its third year and is fast becoming one of the design calendar's key events. The three-day festival of talks and exhibitions makes the most of historic local venues such as the Farmiloe Building, the House of Detention and, new space for 2012, the Order of St John museum. This year, London-based design firm, Aberrant Architecture, will reinstate an old Clerkenwell tradition – a travelling theatre that will ask visitors to hop on board and hear their stories. www.clerkenwelldesignweek.com	The Photographers' Gallery re-opens this month with a two-storey extension designed by Dublin firm O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects. The practice, whose Irish cultural centre An Gaeláras was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize last year, has elongated the gallery into a slender stack with large windows that look down on to Soho's busy streets. The first exhibition in the new space will be by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. www.photonet.org.uk



International Contemporary Furniture Fair	Klara Lidén: Bodies of Society	Thomas Heatherwick
Javits Convention Centre, New York	New Museum, New York	Victoria and Albert Museum, London
19-22 May 2012	6 May 2012 – 1 July 2012	31 May 2012 – 30 September 2012
Dedicated design lovers follow the fair trail from Milan to New York this month. In its 24th year, ICFF promises new products, exhibitions and various fringe events, too. Look out for products by New Yorker firm RichBrilliantWilling, Studio Andreas Kowalewski and Istanbul-based design studio Autoban, which will be unveiling an interactive installation for design management firm De La Espada. ICFF Studio, a joint effort with Bernhardt Design, once again pairs talented designers with potential manufacturers. www.icff.com	For the 2008 installation Heating for Crows, rebellious Swedish artist Klara Lidén walled off part of Reena Spaulings' New York gallery, inviting local pigeons, rather than viewers, to inhabit the space. For the Serpentine in 2010, Lidén brought the city into the gallery once again: crushing giant billboard banners into tight spaces so that their original messages became lost. Visit the New Museum this month to see what site-specific subversion Lidén has planned next. www.newmuseum.org	The V&A celebrates one of Britain's most innovative designers this month, hosting the first major solo exhibition of Thomas Heatherwick. Spanning architecture, engineering, urban planning and product design, the exhibition marks two decades of projects by Heatherwick Studio. It includes an original rod from the celebrated Seed Cathedral, a full-scale detail of the new London double-decker bus and a peek at the planned Teesside biomass power station. www.vam.ac.uk



Graphic Design: Now in Production	Frieze New York	Martin Parr: Photography and Collecting
Governors Island, New York	Randall's Island, Manhattan	Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona
26 May 2012 – 3 September 2012	4-7 May 2012	29 May 2012 – 21 October 2012
In May, this blockbuster graphic design exhibition moves to Governors Island, after stints at the Walker Art Centre and the Cooper-Hewitt museum. The show looks at how graphic design has been reaching a wider audience over the past decade, owing to the rise of user-generated content and new creative software. Film-title sequences, branding campaigns, books, posters and magazines with work by Metahaven, Daniel Eatock and Christopher Doyle are all on show. www.cooperhewitt.org	Frieze is crossing the Atlantic this year. Building on the success of London's annual art fair, the inaugural Frieze New York will bring more than 170 contemporary art galleries to Randall's Island Park, Manhattan. Visitors can catch the Frieze ferry across the East River to see work by more than 1,000 artists housed in a temporary structure by New York-based architectural firm SO-IL, as well as eight projects dotted around the island that have been specially commissioned by curator Cecilia Alemani. www.friezenewyork.com	For decades, British photographer and filmmaker Martin Parr has been travelling the world, documenting moments of modern life, leisure and consumption through his critical and humorous perspective. This month, Barcelona's CCCB uses Parr's unique pictures to look at the related acts of photography and collecting, displaying them alongside the postcards and photobooks he has compulsively gathered over the years. www.cccb.org

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof	Christian Louboutin
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	Design Museum, London
15 May 2012 – 4 November 2012	1 May 2012 – 9 July 2012
Every summer, the Met invites an artist to take over its roof garden with a piece of monumental work. This year, the Argentinean architect-cum-artist Tomás Saraceno is creating a constellation of room-sized modules, that appear to float above the city. Using Central Park as an urban backdrop, visitors get the opportunity to temporarily inhabit Saraceno's utopian environment and experience a futuristic urban installation in which art meets architecture. www.metmuseum.org	There's some seriously fancy footwear on show at the Design Museum this month. For 20 years, French designer Christian Louboutin has thrilled the fashion world with his luxury shoes, all of which bear his iconic red sole. Metal-studded stilettos, jewel-embellished pumps and fetish-inspired lace-up boots are all on display for this first UK retrospective of the designer's work. There will also be a special section on Louboutin's photographic collaborations with David Lynch. www.designmuseum.org