Design Parade – villa Noailles

Design PARADE,  gives young designers (maximum ten each year) the opportunity to compete in an international contest and offers professionals (creators, design producers, distributors…) a forum for exchange. The festival is in fact a bilateral mechanism, extending beyond project presentations to give young talents access to professional communities, through exhibit inaugurations, conferences and encounters.

The festival’s program juxtaposes history, theory and practice, between foundations and novelties, designing the landscape of a dynamic, growing and self-renewing discipline, similar to the constantly changing scenery viewed by travelers. During the three-day festival at the villa Noailles and throughout the three months of summer exhibits, let us stop the clock of our frenetic lives, to enjoy a timeless moment in the sun, a time to listen, see and share, in peace and brotherhood.

Jean-Pierre Blanc and Catherine Geel

Event Comittee

THE CONTEST

Every year, a jury of professionals and celebrities select ten or so young designers who are given the opportunity of exhibiting their works and meeting with the jury and the public during the Design PARADE Festival. Winners of the Grand Prix and the SEB Design Award are chosen by deliberation. The public also chooses its winner.

The Grand Prix includes:

- a one-year research internship at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres;
- a stand for the Now! Design à vivre Trade Fair, in the Maison & Objet (Home & Objects) category, during the next edition scheduled in January 2009;
- the exhibit of personal works at the Villa Noailles in June 2009;
- the 3 volumes of Phaidon Design Classic.

The Group Seb Design Award:

Seb, in association with Design Parade since 2007, is asking to the selected designers a precise subject.
The designers are all gathered in Paris and briefed by Frederic Beuvry, head of Seb design department. They each met a Seb designer with whom they communicated during the project conception time. Between June and July, the projects are prototyped by Seb. The jury is to award the winner who will receive from Seb 10,000 euros.  Phaidon is giving some books.

THE EXHIBITIONS

While the festival is inspired by history, creation and research, and while designers remain the main players, a focus is chosen for each yearto explore, debate, enjoy all together.

In 2006, for the 1st festival we choosed to turn around chairs and questions od display as an introduction to what we want to do or to avoid concerning design.

In 2007, we were concentrate about the kind of distances we can link in between classical modern design herited by the different design modern traditions by welcoming the first important work made around Pierre Paulin, the classical and yet controversal metallic furniture and the new critical design represented by designers such as Dunne and Raby, Jurgen Bey, Marti Guixe.

In 2008, we decided trough our programation to keep this tension but inversed. Classical design was represented by the impeccable work of the 1st big exhibition in France of Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec while critical thoughts was shown trough the reconstitution of Superarchutectura, the fist programmatic-manifesto exhibition of Superstudio and Archizoom in 1966 and the testimony of italien masters present with us. We also realised and gave rise the link designers are doing with landscape, expression of rigorous, poetic and even political approaches.
Landscapes pervade the history of design, helping us understand that the scale of design objects used by designers is in fact an environmental component evolving as projects come together, to define an ever open world.
Through Poltronova’s revival of Superarchittetura (1966) and the bringing together of the masters of Italian design, young designers are given the chance to hear and understand those who have made design an independent profession, now recognized worldwide.
With their large landscape paintings, the Bouroullec brothers open their universe and share the different epochs of their lives as designers. We also hope that the documents compiled for the modern gardens exhibit, emphasizing the interrelationships between objects, small-scale architectural developments and landscapes, will tie in quite naturally with Superarchittetura, a landscape per se.