For the 2025 London Design Biennale at Somerset House, the Sultanate of Oman presented Memory Grid, a pavilion built around steel display cabinets holding rows of vessels cast from a traditional Omani clay pot. The pavilion was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth and designed by Zawraq Collective, responding to the Biennale theme Surface Reflections.
KitMapper was the production partner. We started with feasibility, suppliers and costings, then managed the fabrication and installation of the pavilion's technical layers. From the designers' 3D-scanned mould, our vacuum-forming partner produced test pieces for sign-off and then around 1,000 vessels in tinted PETG for the cabinets.
Inside the cabinets we fitted RGB and colour-temperature LED strip in diffused aluminium profile, wired so that each cabinet ran from one driver hidden behind the walls. Nothing could be fixed to the Somerset House ceilings, so an eight-metre DMX-controlled LED strip and a pair of Genelec speakers with a media player hung from a freestanding Unistrut frame. Colours and dimming were tested before install, the build was completed on 4 June 2025, the day before the preview, and we handed the Biennale team an operations and maintenance manual.
Installation views: XPAND and Abdullah Al-Saifi. Courtesy Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, Sultanate of Oman.
