Paris Design Week 2024 highlighted contemporary design across Paris, showcasing innovative installations, emerging designers, and sustainability-focused projects.
As a part of Maison & Objet, Paris Design Week continues to showcase the very best of contemporary design, using what the city has to offer as its playground. Sprinkled across four districts in the French capital are 450 key locations in the form of showrooms, boutiques, workshops, hotels, museums, and institutions that display sheer talent and innovation. Simply put, it is a celebration of the limitless nature of creativity.
Last weekend, Maison & Objet hosted a city tour celebrating this event, with a particular focus on Paris’ vibrant Le Marais neighborhood. From a hôtel particulier in Louis XVIII style architecture to studios dedicated to showcasing young, avant-garde designers, here are the Paris Design Week 2024’s highlights that any design enthusiast has to visit, all in walking distance from one another:
Soft, 3D Circular Forms: Squeeze at Place des Vosges
The first stop was the prestigious Hotel de Sully at the Place des Vosges, renowned for its Louis XVIII-style architecture. This location featured London-based designer Paul Cocksedge’s latest installation, entitled Squeeze, which begins with the designer compressing soft, three-dimensional circular forms, eventually reinterpreting them into two-dimensional mirrors that reflect the archival beauty of the place. During the tour of his installation, Cocksedge talked about his desire for the mirrors to reflect the beauty of Hotel de Sully and the fusion of old and new. This invites viewers to look at their reflections amidst the stunning architecture.
Paris Design Week Factory – Espace Commines & Galerie Joseph
“This is the place where you enter anonymously and emerge a superstar,” Andy Warhol once said about his notorious Factory in the 1960s. Inspired by this idea, the Paris Design Week Factory was created to give bold young designers with under five years of activity the chance to express their unique vision to a wider audience and to exchange ideas with each other.
Paris Design Week President Pierre Gendrot mentioned that they received more than 300 applications for the Design Week Factory. They eventually narrowed the selection down to 124 studios, which are divided among two prime locations at the heart of Le Marais: Espace Commines and Galerie Joseph.
At Espace Commines, the exhibits range from the playful, geometric-shaped cabinets of Jonathan Cohen, the graffiti-inspired swivel chair of Studio Martina Dimitrova, and Louis Lefebvre’s chairs covered in sheep hair, the hair colors organized in a gradient. At Galerie Joseph, on the other hand, one can find installations like Le Monde à la Une by designers Claire Renard and Jean-Sébastien Blanc from Studio 5.5, in partnership with Tetra Pak, celebrating 80 years and 80 unique lamps that tell the story of Le Monde. These examples, of course, are just a few of the many remarkable contemporary works on display–the creativity showcased is truly endless.
Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris
How does wood embody new uses in our living spaces? What if wood was a key to solutions for climate change?–these are merely a few of the questions that were reflected on when designers and companies in the wood industry were invited to exhibit their innovations at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris. Their works showcased the fact that wood, a fundamental resource, opens up creative possibilities that encourage us to tackle environmental issues. Exhibitors varied in discipline, from Jérôme Boissière Design Studio aiming to improve the quality of a city’s public spaces to sustainable skateboards by La Parqueterie Nouvelle and La Fabrique Pointcarré.
“Our studio has specialized in recent years in the creation of street furniture, the design of developments, and the realization of projects related to the environment. Our multidisciplinary expertise allows us to support you from the first sketches to manufacturing,” as stated on the Jérôme Boissière website.
Happening in line with September’s rentrée, Paris Design Week marks a fresh start, transforming the capital into a dynamic playground and a breeding ground for new ideas that will shape our lives tomorrow.
Paris Design Week runs from September 5-14, 2024.
