Hydro showcases "revolutionary" aluminium design pieces at London Design Festival

Designer Rachel Griffin discusses the "utopian qualities" of aluminium for Hydro's 100R exhibition, which is captured in this video produced by Dezeen for the brand.

Griffin was one of seven designers featured in Hydro's 100R exhibition, which was on show at the Material Matters fair during this year's London Design Festival.

Directed and conceived by Norwegian designer Lars Beller Fjetland, the exhibition challenged designers to create furniture or lighting pieces solely using Hydro's Circal 100R extruded aluminium.

According to Hydro, Circal 100R is the first aluminium product made entirely from post-consumer scrap that can be mass-produced on an industrial scale.

The brand has measured its carbon footprint to be 97 per cent lower than the global average for primary-grade aluminium.

"Aluminium has these utopian qualities," Griffin said in the video. "The fact that you can take something, reuse it and it still performs the same. It still looks the same. It really does feel like a material of the future."

"It's infinitely recyclable without diminishing any of its mechanical properties," Griffin explained.

Griffin is a furniture and lighting designer based in the Netherlands and founder of Earnest Studio.

For the exhibition, she created a modular folding partition called Serial, comprising a set of interlocking extruded aluminium pieces with an in-built hinge that can be combined to form screens of any length.

"The design of the profile means that the parts can be interlocked together basically forever to make partitions or screens, as long as you want," said Griffin.

"Once all of those pieces are strung together in a chain, they can be arranged in these organic waves, which are self-supporting and use the reflective qualities of the aluminium to its best advantage."

Other designers featured in the show include Max Lamb, Inga Sempé, John Tree and Philippe Malouin.

"It was really a joy to work on this exhibition," said Griffin. "Circal 100R aluminium is revolutionary. It makes the future sort of limitless."

Hydro's 100R exhibition was on display from 18 to 21 September as part of London Design Festival 2024. See our London Design Festival 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place throughout the week.

Partnership content

This video was produced by Dezeen for Shapes by Hydro as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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