Kengo Kuma on Childhood: ''As a child, when I was at home, I used to play with wood blocks all day long. Working on materials must have come from that habit''. ''My fondness of holes or passageways comes from my childhood experience...back then, there were still some bomb shelters remaining in the hill (behind our house) and that was our ideal playing feel. I loved the time of hiding in the shelter, totally detached from the life outside.'' image via edition.cnn.com

Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design

17 September, 2015- 23 January, 2016 @ Roca London Gallery

The new exhibition, Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at Roca London Gallery explores top designers and architects including Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind how childhood experience has affected their work. Architects and designers are often asked whose work inspired them as students –Frank Lloyd Wright or Alvar Aalto, Elsa Schiaparelli perhaps, or Charles and Ray Eames –and how this has influenced their own work.

But inspiration often goes back much further than this, into early childhood, and does not necessarily take the form of specific buildings or designs. It might do; but it can also take the form of more indirect experiences: the feel or scent of a material or place, the chance encounter of objects or sensations at a particular moment, or an ordinary incident that makes such a lasting impression that it subsequently operates on an intuitive level.

In this exhibition, the memories of 6 outstanding designers, in architecture and fashion, have been recorded and re-collected in the context of their contemporary work, to create individual multi-sensory displays that explore the relationship between memory and design. The text, both in the exhibition and guide, has been created from new interviews by Clare Farrow, and also features extracts from a new manuscript by Denise Scott Brown. The resulting material provides a fascinating insight into the origins of 6 unique visions in the world of design – personal stories that intersect with world history. The participants are: Zaha Hadid, Kengo Kuma, Daniel Libeskind, Nieto Sobejano, Denise Scott Brown and Phillip Treacy. The curator of exhibition is Clare Farrow.

> via roca.adsy.me