Clerkenwell Design Week, 2012. London.

Central London 'hood Clerkenwell is one serious buzzing beehive of design activity. Since the Industrial Revolution it has been home to craft workshops, printers, jewellers, clockmakers, and bookbinders. Today, it has more showrooms (60), creative agencies, and architects per square mile than any other area in the UK. Later this month, it shows its best during Clerkenwell Design Week, May 22–24.

Installations

Clerkenwell Green: Aberrant Architecture / The Small-Coal-Man’s Travelling Theatre

London-based duo Aberrant Architecture will be responding to Clerkenwell’s history as a site for mystery plays and street theatre with the Small-Coal-Man’s Tiny Travelling Theatre. In 1678 Thomas Britton turned his rooms above a coal shed in Clerkenwell into a concert hall called the Small-Coal-Man’s Musick Club, a wildly popular venue that attracted performances from first-time amateurs to Handel. Aberrant’s mobile version will tour Clerkenwell and seat an audience of between two and six people, with a small bar area outside.

St James’ Church Gardens: Francesco Draisci / Forest

The London-based Italian architect will be making a pavilion made out of Fulton umbrellas for the festival. Draisci, who has created installations for Richard Rogers and Ron Arad, says he’s used to working with strange materials: “It’s a series of umbrellas in reds and pinks and orange, all the warm colours. They’ll be mounted on really long poles. At the moment I’m hoping for three and a half metres but I don’t want to promise that.” Draisci has multi-purpose hope for the 10x10 m structure: “The idea is that you have this framework which will be like filigree and in this framework you can have seating in hammocks and things like that in between the poles.” While visitors stand or lounge around, Draisci plans to have a programme of talks and storytelling. “Maybe designers or architects have stories to tell, and it will be a fantastic time to spend with children for families, and perhaps they can learn about design through design.”

St John’s Square: Ross Lovegrove

Ross Lovegrove’s Solar Tree will be installed in St John’s Square. The 6m light, manufactured by Artemide, features an LED at the tip of each of its ten “branches”. For Lovegrove, the solar tree is an attempt to improve on the dismal, haphazard, state of street furniture: “Most things which you put outside of value are just cars,” he says. The ten heads all collect energy, with four of them delivering light, and the concrete base is in segments, “like an orange” so that it can be shipped. The light will stay in the square until September, as a contribution to London’s Olympic celebrations. Lovegrove hopes that eventually the solar could sell energy back to the grid: “I think cities can have a good heart; they can set up a model of greening.”

Frameless Gallery: Collective Works

Vienna-based duo Mischer’Traxler have made bowls out of vegetables, batteries out of Nespresso capsules, and an automated cake-decorating machine. In May they’ll be setting up in the Frameless Gallery with the basket-making project they showed at Design Miami/Basel. Collective Works is a collaborative process between the designers, their equipment and an audience: part-performance piece, part process at work. Each day Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler will make a new wooden veneer basket, but there will be no baskets without visitors. The process they have devised needs an audience before the machine will rotate, to make the spools of wood turn through the glue. With an audience of two, the basket gets marked with blue pen and the colours get darker the more people there are and, regardless of numbers, each basket will be unique