Dezeen Magazine

Around the Corner by Amanda Levete

Around the Corner is an exhibition of four new pieces by Amanda Levete of architects Future Systems for British manufacturers Established & Sons.

The exhibition includes four limited-edition pieces, each using a different material to explore the use of space in the corner of a room.

North is a console table made from neon-coloured fibreglass (second image). East (above and below) is a corner desk carved from a single piece of black marble. The white pair of shelves is called South and is made from Corian, while West (top image) is a bench made from laminated wood.

The pieces are carved using digital technology and then finished by hand. The exhibition continues at the Established & Sons LIMITED gallery at 2-3 Duke Street, London SW1Y 6BJ until 26 March.

 

Here's some more information from Future Systems:

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Established & Sons LIMITED presents Amanda Levete’s first solo exhibition

Around the Corner

Established & Sons LIMITED presents Around the Corner, an exhibition by Amanda Levete of Future Systems, opening on the 14th of February.

This ground-breaking exhibition will feature four limited edition pieces of furniture designed by one of Britain’s most innovative architects. Levete’s show will explore the relationship between the void in the corner of a room and the response that inhabiting this space invokes.

 

Amanda Levete has been an integral member of the Established & Sons stable of designers since the company’s launch in 2005. Her Chester sofa (2005) and Drift bench (2006) are two of the most compelling and most talked-about pieces produced for the company’s collections.

Now, with Around the Corner, Levete further experiments, developing an architectural language of fluid, organic and natural forms.

“The corners of a room are often lost spaces, rarely exploited for the display of either art or furniture. I wanted to address this with pieces specifically designed to take up these vacant spaces,” emphasises Levete.

The pieces are about creating a spatial relationship between the corner and object – where the space in between is as important as the object itself.

Designing a piece to be installed where converging walls meet suggests a certain aesthetic complexity. Initial forms were derived from a complex three-dimensional formula that was manipulated digitally and then by hand to create elegant and functional pieces of furniture.

This language of interweaving and fluid forms was stretched to create surfaces that reveal both a top, sides and an underneath. Some of the forms make reference to Levete’s architectural projects; others in turn influence the projects themselves.

“The creative crossover of scales is what interests me in designing both furniture and buildings,” states Levete.

Each piece has been made in a different material to express its particular qualities and to show how perception of a form changes according to the material in which it is conceived.

The process of making the pieces mirrors the way each is designed. Following the completion of the design, digital technology is used to cut and carve out the forms which are then sent to craftspeople who work them by hand.

“The process of machining and hand-crafting is as important to me in the design as it is in the making,” says Levete.