Paris, design takes over the city

For ten days, Paris becomes a city to be explored through design. From 10 to 19 September, Paris Design Week returns with Design in Motion, an edition that reinforces its international dimension and expands the map of venues involved. Galleries, showrooms, schools and cultural institutions spread across Le Marais, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Opéra and Bastille, while design enters into dialogue with the capital’s historic heritage. One of the key pillars of the event is Factory, a laboratory dedicated to emerging talent and collectible design. Four venues in Le Marais, curated by Jean-Baptiste Durand and Simon Geringer, bring together designers and creatives in a journey that moves away from the traditional fair format to create a sequence of individual worlds. At Espace Commines, around forty exhibitors are presented within a specially conceived scenography, while the other venues bring together emerging talents, established designers and works that cross the boundaries between art, craft and design.

It is, however, through its dialogue with historic sites that Paris Design Week finds some of its most spectacular expressions. At the Grand Palais, Uchronia transforms the Rotonde d’Antin with Le Grand Bouquet: a monumental bloom inspired by the building’s architecture and decorative vocabulary, created in collaboration with several French craft houses. At the Musée Bourdelle, Anthony Guerrée’s Contrepoint creates a sensitive dialogue between furniture and Antoine Bourdelle’s sculptures, using wood, glass, textiles and clay.

The dialogue between cultures finds one of its most evocative expressions at the Hôtel de la Marine, where Hanjimania places hanji, the traditional Korean paper, at the centre of a Franco-Korean creative exchange. French and Korean designers, including Studio KO, Pierre Yovanovitch and Constance Guisset, work with artisans around an ancient material, reinterpreted through a contemporary design sensibility. Also at the Hôtel de la Marine, Astre Mobile transforms a transparent car into a work of art, bringing together craftsmanship, materials and imagination through interventions by 12 craftspeople.

At the Hôtel de Sully, the focus turns to Joseph Walsh. His sculptural forms in ash, developed through his Irish workshop practice, appear to defy gravity, entering into dialogue with the geometry of the historic architecture. Presented under the title Arcanum Formae, the project brings together new works created especially for the site, including pieces from his Tree Legacy Project. At Bastille, Studio 5.5 addresses circularity with La Re-prise de la Bastille, a monumental installation of 196 flags created from used clothing collected through Refashion. Each flag represents one of the 195 UN member and observer countries, alongside a white flag, turning the Place de la Bastille into a space for coexistence, peace and reflection on textile reuse.

The international dimension runs throughout the programme: from Polish collectible design in The Matter of Earth, presented at the Institut Polonais de Paris, to the dialogue between Saudi Arabia and France explored in The Life of Forms at Lafayette Anticipations, and the Japanese-inspired world of The Call of the Archipelago at Le Bon Marché. The Matter of Earth runs from 10 September to 4 October, while The Life of Forms is presented from 8 to 13 September, bringing AlUla’s emerging design scene into dialogue with works from the Lafayette Anticipations collection.

Completing this expanding geography are new addresses: Pierre Frey inaugurates a 500-square-metre space dedicated to furniture at 14 rue du Mail, designed as a Parisian apartment, while La Galerie Andrée Putman opens to the public for the first time during Paris Design Week, presenting archival pieces, reissues and recent creations at 9 bis rue de Saxe in the 7th arrondissement. A growing network that reflects the vocation of Paris Design Week: not to concentrate design in a single location, but to make it happen throughout the city, weaving it into Paris’s history, architecture and creative scene.