Designers merge the body and the industrial

The Design Museum in London has opened The Nue Black Aesthetic, an exhibition tracing seven decades of Black design through sixteen contributors, including Taiba Akhuetie, Ini Archibong, and Giles Tettey Nartey (Unorthodox Blend). Akhuetie constructs chairs and lampshades from synthetic hair to challenge beauty standards, while Nartey reinterprets the West African balafon xylophone as a site for ongoing experimentation. The exhibition spans six sections and culminates in Mfon, a site-specific chandelier of hand-blown Murano glass by Archibong that invites viewers to slow their pace.

This integration of the human body and industrial form mirrors the approach of architect Ricardo Bofill at La Fábrica in Barcelona. Bofill converted a 1973 cement factory into his studio by preserving eight original silos and carving elongated, medieval-inspired arched windows into the concrete shells (Paula Cademartori from THE UNIVERSE OF PAULA). The mechanism of this transformation relies on the interplay of light and shadow across geometric volumes, where the industrial past remains visible even as the space functions as a living, breathing studio. Bofill intentionally designed his buildings to observe how movement through them shifts the perception of color and landscape, effectively dissolving the boundary between a rigid industrial site and a poetic, domestic environment.