design
Marianka Swain
While most set designers come from an art or theatre background, Ric Lipson has parlayed his architectural training into an unusual skillset: designing not just what goes on inside entertainment venues, but the buildings themselves. At his studio Stufish Entertainment Architects, founded by the late Mark Fisher in the mid 1990s, the team provides anything from a mic stand up to creating new and complex edifices.They’ve worked on tours for the likes of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Queen, a Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas show, West End hits like We Will Rock You, and one-off events such as Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
When it got too hard to ship the original American edition across the Atlantic during the Great War, British Vogue appeared as a sister publication in the Condé Nast empire. The first issue in September 1916 announced in its editorial: “The time has come, designers say, to talk of many things – of shoes and furs and lingerie, and if one flares or clings… and whether hats have wings… Really and truly, such amazing things are going to happen to you that you never would believe them, unless you saw them in Vogue.” It must have been an extraordinary affirmation of dreams and aspirations, of the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
It may seem like a long way from Shakespeare to Siegfried and Roy, but John Napier has had a remarkable career in which high and low art come together and share the applause. So not only has the theatre designer staged a magic show in Vegas, he’s worked a more subtle magic in his time at the RSC. And in a world where musicals run for decades, Napier’s stage sets have been among the most consistent and celebrated factors in the success of many of our best-loved West End shows.So if you’ve ever seen Cats or Starlight Express, Les Misérables or Miss Saigon – or caught Nicholas Nickleby in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Here they are the stars of “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, an anthology of projects and successes, shown not only in actual produced objects but drawings Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
If you thought the era of the impresario died with Diaghilev, think again. Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler's Wells, has commercial and artistic vision in spades, and masterfully combines them in his operation at the Wells. Witness last night's show, Gravity Fatigue: inviting a fashion designer, even one as visionary as Hussein Chalayan, to create a dance show might seem like a risky (and expensive) venture, but the theatre was packed to the rafters, fashiony types mingling with the theatre's usual dance audience and all convinced they had come there for a major Artistic Event.It Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This year Birmingham Royal Ballet celebrates 25 years in the city, during which time the company has presented more than 130 different ballets. Over the years, Birmingham Royal Ballet has worked with some of the biggest names in theatrical design, art and fashion, including Jasper Conran OBE, John Macfarlane, Philip Prowse and Katrina Lindsay. To mark their silver jubilee, the company has teamed up with House of Fraser’s Birmingham store to display a few highlights from their extensive catalogue of costumes. The Arts Desk asked Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Costume Assistant, Anna Willetts about Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the lessons we consistently learn from the makers and creators featured in We Made It is that necessity truly is the mother of invention. By negotiating their way around unfamiliar media and techniques, fighting against their limitations, and expressing creative urges by any means necessary, our subjects have as often as not pushed through into unexplored territories and found unique modes outside of standard categories.This certainly goes for Tiff McGinnis, aka Grande Dame. Formerly the electro-rock one-woman-band Crazy Girl, her methods of expression have expanded into print, Read more ...
bella.todd
If you’ve read any of the glowing reviews for the current revival of Caryl Churchill’s cloning play A Number, you’ll know all about the extraordinary set. Produced at the Nuffield in Southampton last year and transferred to the Young Vic this week, the intense production places father-and-son performers John and Lex Shrapnel inside a mirrored box where their every move is reflected infinitely. The audience is split into four around its edges, and watches the action through one-way glass. In between scenes, the mirror effect is reversed and the audience sees itself reflected. How the hell do Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The young, rather homely yet grand gentleman is lounging under a tree, behind him a formal knot garden. His costume is extravagant and rich, and his hat is charming. This exquisite 1590s miniature by Isaac Oliver, watercolour on vellum, titled indeed A Young Man Seated Under a Tree, is the first depiction in art of a knot garden; flowers and plants by the tree are meticulously detailed, and in the background is the classic Renaissance knot garden. It is but one among many almost unimaginable treasures, all from the Royal Collection, which tell us the history of the landscaped garden from Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Can you sense a person's life through a sequence of objects? Not to mention influence and legacy? Biographical exhibitions are fascinating, not least because they also tell us something about looking back through the filter of the present. And William Morris (1834-1896) has certainly been, in many ways, a man for all seasons. Here the gifted design historian and biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, is the compiler in charge, providing an affecting look at a man whose sheer intelligence, combined with heartbreaking energy, determination and idealism, not only affected his world but went further Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Blame the weather: it works every time. In 1858, the long hot summer thwarted the building of an 11-mile glass-covered network of roads and railways that would have linked all existing London stations, crossed the river in three places and, it was believed by its architect Joseph Paxton, relieved the congestion that was making crossing the capital an anxious business.His track record was proven, and spectacular, as discovered in Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain, the first of three programmes visiting castles in the air – high-minded, often high-flying, projects that never left the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...