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Nous Gallery promotes design and more: Founder Melissa Woolford sleeplessly inspires |
It sounds like a young designer’s career Utopia: a job with one of the world’s most highly regarded architects, coupled with a curatorship presenting a bold and brilliant series of exhibitions, installations, and conceptual projects internationally.
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Meet designer Melissa Woolford. After earning her M.Arch. with honors from the Pratt Institute in New York in 2006, Woolford moved to London to work for Zaha Hadid. In 2007, she teamed up Paul Coates, architecture educator since 1970, and Christian Derix, founder of Aedas Architects (both faculty members at the University of East London, where Woolford has also adjudicated), and founded Nous Gallery.
Its creators describe Nous (rhymes with “house”) as “a gallery, network, and publication with an initiative to expose and promote design qualities inherent in digital media and technologies for architecture and design.” If there’s a unifying concept in Nous Gallery exhibitions, it is one that deconstructs the working processes of architects — expressing science, mathematics, and philosophy in graphic forms. Characteristically, the inaugural Nous Gallery show in London’s King’s Cross explored visual expressions of the algorithm.
Several shows later, the gallery relocated to a warehouse-style building in Clerkenwell Close, London, and seems likely to remain a fairly migrant entity. “At the moment we have sponsors,” says Woolford, “for printing, for the spaces that we use, for the Web site, and film production, but all other expenses for all the exhibitions come from us directly. We would love sponsorship to be able to do all the amazing projects we are approached about!” One such project, an impressive installation called Blink And You’ll Miss It, recently appeared at the 2009 Beyond Media conference in Florence, Italy, with future plans to bring it to the London Design Festival in September. Designed by Tom Cecil in collaboration with Phil Langley and Shajay Bhooshan, Blink uses an image library to analyze in real time our subconscious responses to architecture. The information is then used to create a digital collage whereby the size and position of images is determined by the viewer’s responses.
More than a gallery, Nous is a community. Nousgallery.com plays host to information about past and present exhibitions, an online gallery, and a forum in which members of the Nous network can post details of their latest projects. A Nous publication of essays and articles is planned for later in 2009.
As a director and curator, Woolford now divides her hours between designing for Zaha Hadid four days a week and spending virtually all her remaining time on Nous. “The fantastic part is having both the perspective of being a designer in the profession and running Nous, which exposes me to the goings on in architecture and design around the world.”
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