The INSIDE STORY of the NEW V&A
FROM JUTE, JAM AND JOURNALISM TO UK’S COOLEST LITTLE CITY... THE £80M MUSEUM AT THE HEART OF DUNDEE’S RENAISSANCE
PERCHED on the river’s edge, it could be a giant water creature from another planet. From other angles the building looks like a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid. The designer himself says the slanted facades are influenced by Scotland’s cliffs.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all about the three-storey structure by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is where it is to be found.
Cutting-edge design has not exactly been a calling card of Scotland’s fourth city down the years. Indeed, only a generation ago, the idea of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opening its only other branch in Dundee would have seemed faintly preposterous.
The V&A Dundee will open in September – and a half million visitors in its first year are anticipated.
The opening will complete a remarkable transformation for the former industrial city, which sank into decline after the Second World War and, as recently as 2012, had the worst unemployment rate in Scotland.
Just six years on, The Wall Street Journal ranks Dundee as one of the ‘ten hot destinations’ for 2018, while GQ magazine recently named it ‘Britain’s coolest little city’.
Something, it seems, has gone very right for the city once associated with the three Js – jute, jam and journalism – and the budget-busting museum of design is at the very heart of that recasting.
Besides a breathtaking building taking pride of place between the road and rail bridges on the Tay, then, what else does the £80million attraction bring to the table?
Well, says the museum’s director Philip Long, it brings a story – one seldom told and still more rarely understood – of a nation’s extraordinary design history.
‘It’s an amazing story of creativity and entrepreneurship which stretches across hundreds of years,’ he says.
Included in the story are such diverse artefacts as a pair of classic Hunter wellies and a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from a 1960 edition of the Beano. The wellingtons, obligatory accessory of the rural gentry, have their origins in the North British Rubber Company founded in Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge in 1856.
Dennis the Menace, meanwhile, was born and bred in Dundee along with a host of other DC Thomson comic creations – Desperate Dan, Oor Wullie, Minnie the Minx, Korky the Cat…
THE comic strip from April 30, 1960, was drawn by artist David Law, who pioneered written sound effects such as ‘ROAR’ and ‘WHACK’ to bring the story to life. The technique was widely imitated and, later in the 1960s, was even transferred to TV in the Batman and Robin TV series.
Elsewhere, there is a bizarre geometric elephant fashioned in the early 1970s from the linoleum which kept Kirkcaldy’s economy afloat for decades.
Designed by Scotsman Eduardo Paolozzi, it was actually a case in which the Nairn Floors catalogue for 1972-3 was meant to be contained. Forbo-Nairn remains the only factory in the Fife town – and indeed the whole of the UK – still manufacturing linoleum today.
Dating back rather further, to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, there is a lady’s garter with the inscription ‘Our prince is brave, our cause is just’ woven into it. Experts believe it was a tacit means of expressing solidarity with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite cause.
Fans, glasses and snuffboxes which reveal similar sympathies also survive and demonstrate the early use of design to express political allegiance.
Then, bringing the story right up to date, the Snap40 wearable phone app, developed in Edinburgh, which uses artificial intelligence to monitor a hospital patient’s vital signs, alerting staff via wireless technology if there is a problem.
The app was designed more than 500 years after the earliest exhibit in the collection, a devotional Book of Hours, made in Rouen in northern France around 1480. One theory is it was a gift from the French to the Garde Écossaise, an elite group of Scots soldiers who served as personal bodyguards to the French king.
The book’s month by month calendar of feast days mentions several Scottish saints, including St Monan, indicating it was intended for a Scottish owner. From the very earliest item, then, a demonstration of Scotland’s international relations and connectivity. That thread can be traced all the way to the Snap40, says Mr Long.
Certainly the Highland pistols dating from the 17th and 18th centuries and made entirely of steel had an international appeal. Sold at first to local aristocrats for duelling purposes, the Scottish guns became favourites of both Peter the Great of Russia and Louis XIV of France.
The Perthshire town of Doune became particularly renowned for the manufacture of the pistols. Indeed, a gun made there is reputed to have fired the opening shot in the American War of Independence.
But it is the so-called Glasgow Style, widely recognised as the most significant modern design movement to have originated in Scotland, which will form the museum’s stunning centrepiece.
This is the painstakingly restored Oak Room – a 44ft tea room dating back some 110 years to a time when a temperance supporter called Kate Cranston was one of Glasgow’s foremost tycoons and Charles Rennie Mackintosh was her
go-to interior designer. The woodpanelled salon was one of many fashioned to the minutest detail by Mackintosh in the first decade of the 20th century, when Miss Cranston’s chain of Glasgow tearooms were, to the surprise of many, becoming a serious alternative to the pub.
But, by the late 1940s, the business had changed hands and was running out of steam. The Ingram Street premises were sold to the local authority, Glasgow Corporation, which let out the former tea rooms as retail space and allowed tenants to do more or less as they pleased with the interiors.
Over the next two decades one tenant stapled over Mackintosh’s exquisite wood panelling with pegboard. Another decided to ‘improve’ the master designer’s decorative scheme by slapping brown paint over it.
So dilapidated were the Mackintosh rooms by 1971 when Stakis Hotels bought the building that many thought the panelling fit only for the bin. Certainly the keeper of decorative arts at Glasgow Museums did not think it worth having.
Almost five decades later, Mr Long begs to differ. He believes the fabled Oak Room should be the key exhibit in a museum celebrating Scotland’s design excellence. Luckily for him, then, the room was carefully dismantled, logged and coded for future reconstruction.
MR Long says: ‘I was aware of Glasgow having in its collection disassembled room interiors by Mackintosh and out of that conversation came a possibility that we might look to conserve and reconstruct one of them. That’s one of the exciting things about V&A Dundee.
‘It’s an ambitious project and it suggests those sorts of very ambitious possibilities, which the Oak Room is.
‘It comes from the most extraordinary period in Mackintosh’s career at the beginning of the 20th century when he was really at the height of his powers.’
Not that all Mackintosh aficionados are quite as enthusiastic about the idea as Mr Long.
Roger Billcliffe, a Mackintosh expert and one of the last people to see the Oak Room in situ before it was taken apart, points out that the furniture Mackintosh designed for the Oak Room was later moved to the Glasgow School of Art where, tragically, it was destroyed by fire in 2014.
‘A Mackintosh room without its furniture is like a mannequin without clothes,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s going to be wonderful to see the room but the whole point about what Mackintosh was doing was coordinating every aspect of a room, which he treated as a work of art. So furniture, curtains, lighting… everything was part of the whole creation and you will only be getting half of it.’
Asked how the museum intends to overcome this problem, a V&A spokesman says full details will be unveiled next year. But it is perhaps the building itself which will become the most potent symbol of Scotland’s design ambition – even if its delivery has been far from straightforward. Indeed, some might uncharitably suggest it is a symbol of over-ambition.
Original plans for the building had it snaking out well into the Tay, bringing construction challenges with eye-watering implications for a budget which was supposed to be rigidly pegged at £45million.
That raised questions as to why the judging panel considering architectural submissions for the building chose one built in the water. The answer was all the entries showed a building over the river – and costs attached to each were potentially astronomical.
At first all concerned adhered strictly to the party line that the building would go ahead exactly as planned and on budget. For his part, Kuma insisted in 2011 that an overspend was simply not possible in the 21st century when everyone is watching the cost.
But by the following year reality began to prevail as the original blueprints were withdrawn and the building was pulled back to the shore.
Even then the project could not remain within budget. By January 2015, the £45million waterfront development funded largely by public money had ballooned to an £80.11million one. And not a single brick had been laid.
Yet, three years on, the outcry over these miscalculations has turned to something approaching awe.
Dundee has a spectacular new tourism attraction – a focal point in an endlessly photogenic river setting – and there is a palpable sense of anticipation about the day when it opens its doors.
While September has been announced as the opening date, officially the building remains a building site – one without any exhibits or museum staff working within. Mr Long predicts it will be the spring before he can finally occupy his office there – seven years after taking up his post as museum director.
He says: ‘It’s an overused expression but, underneath the graceful swan of the building there’s an enormous amount going on in getting everything ready to make this the world-class museum that we want it to be.’
There have, he admits, been ‘challenges’.
When he took up his post in 2011 he expected to have a completed – and open – museum by 2014.
But he says: ‘Projects such as this that are ambitious and which build unique buildings accept that the timelines can change and that has happened with V&A Dundee.
‘But we have remained focused on delivering this institution and not only delivering it but setting it up in such a way that it becomes one of the most exciting new cultural assets that Scotland has.’
The modern benchmark for European museum projects is perhaps the Guggenheim, built in a run-down port area of Spain’s Bilbao on time and on budget and opening in 1997.
DESIGNED by Frank Gehry, it is recognised today as one of the world’s most spectacular buildings and as the fillip for the regeneration of a depressed city.
It may be late and over budget, but can Kuma’s V&A do the same for Dundee?
Mr Long credits many institutions, not least its thriving universities and arts centres, with Dundee’s transformation.
But he adds: ‘At the same time Dundee V&A is a very powerful symbol of Dundee’s new confidence and it is part of the city reforming itself physically through its architecture and its planning.
‘That’s helping to generate interest in the city and it’s helping to attract new investment.’
But the significance of the story the V&A will tell, he says, is not just city-wide but nationwide. Scotland, whether we have known it or not, has been a world leader in design for hundreds of years.
And, says Mr Long: ‘If we have a better understanding of what an entrepreneurial and innovative country we are that gives us confidence to be more creative in the future.’
An inspiring mission statement for Scotland’s newest and boldest museum. All guns are now blazing to hit the September opening.