Design and climate change: for his participation in the exhibition set up by the Carpenters Workshop Gallery the designer and architect voices the growing concern for environmental threats
Virgil Abloh is one of the most versatile creatives of our time: artistic director of the Louis Vuitton menswear line and founder of the Off-White streetwear brand, which since its launch immediately met with enormous success, the designer has however a basic education that does not it’s about fashion. Abloh is in fact a graduate in engineering and architecture, two passions that have continued to influence him in his career (just think of the collection in collaboration with Ikea) and to which he wanted to return, with a new design series.
Entitled Acqua Alta, it will be presented during the 2019 Venice Biennale as an installation on the occasion of the Dysfunctional exhibition of the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in collaboration with Lombard Odier in Ca ‘d’Oro. It is, as the name suggests, a series inspired by the phenomenon of high water in the Venice Lagoon, when the city risks flooding due to the tides and strong summer winds.
“Every time a design project is presented to me, the first thing I refer to is the context,” said the designer. “What makes Venice fascinating is, of course, the landscape, which is almost surreal in nature, and addresses the reality of periodic floods “.
In the collateral exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia 2019 which features Virgil Abloh’s furniture, in fact, we find objects above the surface of the water, but it is the immersed layer that catches the attention: the chairs, the benches and the floor lamp of the Acqua Alta collection they rise inclined, as if they could be submerged by the rising of the water at any time, telling the growing concern for an increasingly threatening climate change. Of which the design, once again, has shown itself to be a powerful vehicle for raising awareness among a wider audience.
