It’s Pandamonium over here

How can architectural models compete with a multitude of little pandas that turn to face you every time you move? They can’t, as is clear at the exhibition of finalists in the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010 at the Design Museum.

Words Pamela Buxton

The pandas, created by Jason Bruges Studio for WWF and several other interactive design nominees were the instant hits among visitors to the show, along with some of the more spectacular exhibits such as BMW’ s GINA fabric-skinned prototype car and Thomas Heatherick’s monumental Extrusions bench. It’s not often that Beth Ditto is elbowed out of the limelight but here, her fantastic range for Evans was upstaged right left and centre.

Architecture is one of seven design categories represented at the show, which rather irritatingly integrates the exhibits to make direct comparison across each discipline difficult. But taken as a whole, it’s a fascinating overview of new creative work which demonstrates a strong concern with sustainability and social concern – electric cars and planes, solar-powered cooker, and Beehaus, a new take on the traditional hive more suited to urban sites. This concern goes across all disciplines from Shigeru Ban’s carbon fibre chair and Grassworks bamboo furniture to the nifty PACT underwear manufactured and packaged within a 100mile radius, and Marlon Blackwell Architects’ Porchdog flood-resistant housing in Mississippi.

There was ingenuity aplenty. I loved the folding plug which by Min-Kyu Choi and the Newspaper Club, which enabled people to print their own newspapers by making use of press downtime. Nice to see that alongside all the exciting screen-based innovations such as the Kindle DX. Full marks to Pearson Lloyd for providing dignity and practicality with their reworking of a commode.

But what of the architecture category? It’s a global shortlist of extremes, from the modest remodelling of Raven Row by 6a Architects to the razzamatazz of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome, curiously shown in fly-through and CGI rather than through photography. The one section of Chipperfield’s Neues Museum can hardly do this fantastic and hugely complex endeavour justice. Sauerbruch Hutton’s model of the Brandhorst Museum in Munich was splendid but we needed to see and know much more about all of the shortlisted buildings. That said, it was hard not to be swayed by the generosity of the High Line Park in New York, which creates a new elevated linear park, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations.

With so many exhibits, explanation is inevitably limited. But without it, the instant appeal of the interactive and the tangible will always hold sway over a photograph or drawing of a building. But what appeals to visitors might not, I suspect, necessarily appeal to the expert jury. There’s not long to wait – they’ll choose category winners on March 4 and an outright winner on March 16. 

Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010, until June 6, Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 www.designmuseum.org