Sandeep Khosla & Tania Singh Khosla
Their work explores history, tradition, culture and climate in the built environment and visual communication. Their work is local and at the same time global. Influences of their education in the US and their response to the rich arts and crafts around them become the set of tools for the projects. This husband and wife duo presented works from their individual practices of architecture and graphic design respectively. Their work largely talked about the modern vocabulary of design in India keeping in mind the culture, context and history of a place. They discussed the visual differences that are seen in the west and the east and interpretations and overlaps. In that spirit their work is a combination of minimalism overlapped with the ornate, embellished and wildly colorful sensibility.
The work presented included their office space which had interesting elements of kitsch from super graphics of hand painted traditional posters that are almost extinct, a rickshaw converted into a reception table to a traditional street barber chair in the waiting area. Restaurants, clubs, bars designed with the most cutting edge technology and lighting methods overlapped with some beautiful contextual design elements that embellish the space and the visual language of the brand. Their work was interesting as the scale varied from large architecture, interiors to very precious details and graphics.
Sandeep and Tania finished the talk by giving us a tour of their beautiful home in Bangalore that they designed together. The spaces were modern, minimalistic influenced by tradition creating large, well-lit rooms and contemplative spaces. They shared with us some of the beautiful sculptures and graphic exploration their own children were doing as well.
Troika
Nothing can prepare you for the work that this talented team presented. Their work is beyond multi-disciplinary and many projects were self initiated. Art meets the most cutting edge of technology. Animation meets photography meets graphic design meets engineering. They presented some of their recent installations and explained the complex technology that was involved in creating these pieces. Not only the development of these ideas, finding the right people to help them make the pieces but also convincing their clients to buy the ideas were part of the challenges of their work.
Projects such as the cloud designed for British Airways that uses simple flipdots, individually wired and programmed to create a poetic sensation of changing clouds and the movement of sunlight. They also designed a complex British pavilion for the Shanghai World’s fair. Some of the challenges for the pavilion were to design a space where 8 million visitors were expecting to visit of which 95% people would be Chinese. They wanted to create a space that was essentially British without becoming kitsch. They created a gigantic green map of London, a giant installation of millions of acrylic tubes that were lit by LEDs at the ends creating a magical space to walk into. The play of light and movement enhanced the experience for the viewer.
Written by:
Jyotika Purwar, Associate creative director, Ogilvy Action Mumbai.
Jyotika Purwar’s day job is in advertising and she loves all things brand and design related.
