Nicholas Alexander fabricated a 7 metre long sculpture of Jeff Goldblum in his character of Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park. The sculpture was erected in front of Tower Bridge to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park.
Manufactured from polystyrene and then finished in scenic paints the result was a true hit with fans and even made its way on to the Graham Norton Show.
For Godiva’s 90th anniversary, the Nicholasalexander’s team and Condiment Junkie delivered the most comprehensive multi-sensory event ever created.
From the moment guests received their invitation, their journey had begun. Every guest was sent a ‘shard’ of a giant artwork in a brand-scented chocolate box, with intriguing instructions on the reverse. Upon arrival they placed their piece on a giant jigsaw. The shards came together to form a giant Oli-B artwork. Through this act, every guest became part of the experience. They each received a replica shard of real chocolate as they left the event.
From the coach journey, to the entrance, to the goodie bags guests left with; every element of the event was sensorially branded using sound, scent, colour and material.
The evening unfolded over three layers. The first layer celebrated the heritage of the brand and the art of the chocolatiers. A central bar featured live displays from the brand chefs. An aroma organ engaged guests with the many ingredients Godiva’s chef-chocolatiers use to create their amazing pieces.
The second layer celebrated a chocolate from each decade of the brand’s journey in an immersive sensory experience. Five ‘chocolate boxes’ and three ‘truffle domes’ each featured a unique sensory environment designed specifically for that piece.
The final layer celebrated innovation and premiered Godiva’s new flavour, ‘Rose and Raspberry’. The entire room was dedicated to enhancing the flavours and communicating the inspiration behind the piece. Guests were treated to a three-course meal designed in collaboration with the two Michelin star chef Christoph Hardiquest. Each course had an accompanying soundscape, scent and film projected onto a screen the entire width of the room – 10m wide. It was possibly the most immersive Michelin-starred meal ever created.
Every element of the event is scaleable and can be activated throughout Godiva’s retail outlets, cafés and global travel experiences.
All of the elements fabricated at the Nicholas Alexander workshop in London and then installed in Brussels in only 24 hours. Complicated structures, rare materials and technologies were used to realise the PR concept.
The result was excellent!
Working with the team at Studio XAG we created a number of mechanisms which animated Christian Louboutin’s “Paris!”. This was a display created for the windows of French luxury department store Le Bon Marché. Behind this window of moving parts we manufactured a number of gear boxes to create the motion that we needed from our vast knowledge of mechanical components.
You can check out the animation on the video below.
Denso manufacturing UK are a company based in Telford England. Nicholas Alexander was invited to build a range of furniture for their learning centre and foyer area.
The furniture created included:
A large 3M Corian plinth with etched text, an LED detail, and a number of acrylic graphics.
A white Corian trophy cabinet to house there president manufacturing award.
An oval reception plith and a range of laminated desks for their learning centre.
The Corian sheets were etched on our in house CNC and then formed over a mould in sections which would later be joined to created a seamless finish.
Nicholas Alexander was invited to design and build 3 sensory relaxation pods for Condiment Junkie and TUI. These were designed to be fitted within their latest Sensatori hotel in Rhodes.
The pods were fabricated from a GRP structure and ceiling mounted. Hotel users could then sit inside to relax whilst a range of mood lighting, sensual sounds and tranquilizing landscape videos played as they gazed up at projection screen.
In celebration of eBay’s 20th birthday, we ferried a giant birthday cake down the Thames! The two tier cake on a foil tray base came complete with eBay coloured icing and even illuminated candles. Built discreetly in Tilbury docks, it then floated up the river to where eBay were hosting a party. Unfortunately the cake was made from MDF and ply, so employees weren’t able to tuck in to what looked like a delicious birthday cake!
Nicholas Alexander worked with Thrsxty to create to design a functional scheme to launch of Hibiki Japanese Harmony.
The aim of the progect was to create an authentic Japanese cultural context to establish deeper understanding of the Hibiki Brand and the House of Suntory Whisky.
The bar proved very popular during the weekend, so unfortunately there was nothing left for us to drink when we arrived to take it down!
The Mobile Orchard is a new public installation designed by atmos – an inhabitable hymn to the urban fruit tree, commissioned as the centrepiece for the City of London Festival. Its exuberant design celebrates the wonder of trees, and offers a magical mutation – a welcoming structure tailored to humans. We were brought in to rationalise the fabrication process and get it built!
The City of London Festival commissioned the Mobile Orchard for 2013 as part of an ongoing objective to raise awareness of environmental issues through artistic responses to the natural world. Alongside the manufactured tree at the Mobile Orchard’s centre, sixty four real trees, donated by the Worshipful Company of Fruiterers, will travel with it around the City. After the Festival twelve of these will be planted at Middlesex Street Estate to form the City of London’s first community orchard; the remainder will be distributed to schools around the capital. The sculpture itself will be gifted to the Festival’s partner charity Trees for Cities as part of their 20th anniversary celebrations and will continue to be used around the country.
Nicholas Alexander was brought on to handle the fabrication of the ambitious Mobile Orchard. Given our extensive experience of unusual and exciting one-off constructions, and in-house digital fabrication capabilities, we were an obvious choice! Rationalising the build process of such a complex object was the main role for the company – taking what is theoretical in a set of drawings and turning this into an organised and buildable set of components. Given the tight budget and vast amount of labour necessary to complete the fabrication, Nicholas Alexander organised and welcomed into their workshop a diverse group of volunteers of varying skill levels. Everyone had in abundance an enthusiasm and a passion to work together, learning new skills from the team at Nicholas Alexander and seeing the tree develop and grow over the course of a few weeks.
From the architects: It centers on a large, sculptural timber oasis that doubles as immersive summer street furniture – morphing into seating, shelter, stairway and sky-throne. Its undulating roots offer a landscape for lounging, including sinuous benches and molten armchairs that cradle the gaze upwards through the hollow trunk.Massive branches worm outwards to offer further seats, and splay to form fluid steps that lead to a branch-clad throne at the tip of the trunk.A lightweight latticework of aluminium unfurls from the laminated plywood grains to support a canopy of lasercut leaves – each blade a local London borough, with the Host borough further subdivided into wards – the blossom and seeds of the project.Electric LED lighting threads through its veins, uniting base and crown, their sinuous lines like section-cuts that graphically describe the segments of its core geometry, terminating in glowing bulbs of moon-light spots.
The installation is edible – cradling a constellation of real apples, refreshed daily, that are ripe for the plucking by any member of the public. It is accompanied by a choir of young fruit trees that, like the modular nature of the tree itself, will grow over time, awaiting a future in schools and orchards across London.It will host a series of events and performances, including specially-commissioned theatre and music, a Fruit-Feast dinner and an Urban Picnic of gleaned fruit and veg from the team at Feeding the 5,000. The project seeks to create a new kind of public landscape that merges the best of man-made design and organic nature. It offers a labyrinth of complex, intriguing, generous spaces that seek to nourish all the senses – celebrating both natural trees, and the communion of cities.
We worked with Studio Xag to create a series of 4 animated shop window displays and a pop-up store for Christian Louboutin in Selfridges. We built a zoetrope of counterbalanced, rotating legs as the main piece, as well as cladding various display stands and cabinets for the interior and cutting bespoke anniversary archways. We worked in partnership with Studio Xag on the whole project – our team created the structures and various mechanisms based on their design, and they produced the graphics and artwork with Verve Display. Our 2 install teams came together at the end to fit the whole project.
We were delighted to find out that part of the installation, a pair of mechanical scissoring legs, was then chosen for display at the Design Museum as part of a Louboutin retrospective.
We worked with Softroom on this great project for Wahaca, developing a system which used 9000 recycled bottles to create a floating ceiling raft to act as a lighting cloud. We produced 2 of these undulating structures to hang above the main dining space and provide ambient light. We also worked on some bespoke cast wash hand basin toughs for the loos. These were cast in jesmonite and then tiled with beautiful hand glazed Spanish tiles.
We are lucky to have worked on various Wahaca projects in the past, with another in the pipeline…details yet to be announced!