VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
Scottish Field get an exclusive peek behind the scenes at the V&A Museum of Design in Dundee ahead of its opening
Not since the Guggenheim in Bilbao has a museum opening been as eagerly anticipated as that of the new V&A Museum of Design on Dundee’s waterfront. Richard Bath spoke to the men and women whose vision has produced a remarkable new institution for the City of Discovery, one whose impact has already spread far beyond the cultural sphere
Breathtaking in its ambition, awe-inspiring in its conception and execution, the opening of the V&A Dundee is one of the most significant cultural events in post-war Scotland. Persuading a world-class institution like the V&A that Tayside is the right place to open its first satellite operation isn’t just a cultural coup, it’s a development which has kick-started a complete regeneration of Scotland’s fourth biggest city and excited interest around the world.
‘This museum has the potential to do for Dundee what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao,’ says Mike Galloway, the executive director of city development at Dundee City Council. ‘With projects like the Rep Theatre and Dundee Contemporary Arts centre the city had already come to see culture as having a central importance within its economy, and the V&A is that concept writ large.’
The V&A Dundee is the centrepiece of a £1bn waterfront development that is already transforming a city that was once famous for the three Js – jute, jam and journalism – but which has struggled to come to terms with the challenges of its post- industrial period. But then serendipity lent a hand. The city council had already committed itself to urban regeneration based around the waterfront, but was struggling to find a centrepiece that would act as a catalyst to inject some muchneeded investment and dynamism into a redevelopment aimed at restructuring the city towards knowledge-based industries.
‘In 2007 we were doing the waterfront and were in the midst of doing all of the infrastructure,’ said Galloway, ‘but we realised that we really needed something to create a spark that would bring it to life. We had the guts to admit that we didn’t know what that was but that we would know it when we saw it. And then there was a chance conversation that really opened our eyes.’
That conversation took place over lunch between Galloway and V&A director Sir Mark Jones, who was in the city at the invitation of the city’s university and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Jones, who as the former director of the National Museums of Scotland oversaw the creation of the Museum of Scotland in 1998 knew Scotland’s cultural landscape intimately, had already been approached by the university’s
‘This museum has the potential to do for Dundee what the Guggenheim has done for Bilbao’
‘It’s a very distinctive building but it’s not a show-off building. It will stand the test of time’
chancellor Alan Langlands and Georgina Follett, the dean of Duncan of Jordanstone, who were looking for a way to build upon the city’s burgeoning cultural reputation thanks to the DCA. Between Jones, Follett, Langlands and university secretary David Duncan, a plan was eventually hatched, with Galloway’s offer of a waterfront site tipping the idea from a remote possibility to a distinct probability.
From there the project gathered speed at a truly remarkable rate. With Dundee Council’s financial backing providing the commercial clout to accompany the vision – the council had already allocated £90m to clear the waterfront and build the necessary infrastructure – other partners were brought on board. The city’s two universities and Scottish Enterprise joined the council as founding partners to form a steering group and lobby for funds. On the back of their business plan, the Scottish government quickly became enthusiastic advocates, while the Lottery provided significant funds. When a fund-raising campaign to attract private donations brought in the staggering figure of £15 million, the momentum was almost unstoppable.
One of the most significant milestones in the history of the museum was the decision to appoint Kengo Kuma after the Japanese architect’s design, featuring two inverted pyramids which connect on the first floor, plus a ship-like ‘prow’ leaning over the water and recalling the city’s shipbuilding past, won a hotly-contested international competition to design the V&A museum. Although the museum’s position on such a prominent site has ensured it is highly conspicuous, Galloway says that the brief was to produce a contemporary yet sotto voce building that played second-fiddle to its contents.
‘It is a museum of design, so the building itself has to portray what we believe design can bring to the creation of object and cities, and obviously has to be of the highest quality,’ says Galloway. ‘But Kuma is an architect who’s against landmark architecture. So we’ve got a very distinctive building but it’s not a show-off building that will be in vogue for a few years and then people will say “well that’s very much of its time, isn’t it?” I think this building will stand the test of time.
‘Kuma looked at the local context, not just in Dundee but up and down the river. His inspiration came from sea cliffs,
like stacks on the edge of the land going into the sea. This building is rooted here and it’s functional: he talked about the main hall being “the living room of Dundee”, and I like that sense of it being a place for the community.’
The resulting building – which is two buildings on the ground floor and one on the upper, and which is made up of 2,500 two-tonne concrete panels, while the interior is wood – actually remains the property of Dundee through the city council, operated by the separate charity Dundee Design Ltd under the name V&A Dundee, with the V&A paying a peppercorn rent. ‘It is,’ says former V&A director Sir Mark Jones, ‘very much Dundee’s project’.
Yet the involvement of the V&A and the access to their 12,000 Scottish design exhibits has been central to the creation of the museum, although there have been many loans from Scottish institutions, including the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Oak Room from Glasgow Life, which is the single most significant exhibit in the museum. Once the decision had been taken that it should be a design museum, the 12,000 or so exhibits were whittled down to 300 which tell the story of Scottish design.
These, say curator Joanna Norman, have been broken down into three distinct areas. ‘The first is the Story of Scottish Design, an overview of the way Scotland’s design is influenced by history and geography,’ she says. ‘The second, Design and Society, is about how design can improve our lives, homes, cities and environment. The last is called Design for the Imagination, and is about design as a form of storytelling in the theatre, in film, the design of video games or comics.’
The exhibitions and exhibits are wide-ranging. The inaugural exhibition will be ‘Ocean Liners: Speed & Style’, which includes items as diverse as Stanley Spencer’s 1941 painting The Riveters from his Shipbuilding on the Clyde series, to Jeanne Lanvin’s 1920s ‘Salambo’ flapper dress.
Other exhibits show how Scottish designers exported their skills to the wider world. Visitors will learn, for instance, about Alexander MacRae, who emigrated from Aberdeen to Sydney and founded an undergarment hosiery company in New South Wales. Scotland was well-known for its undergarments and knitting industry so he adapted that to Australia and the beach culture and created the Speedo.
Even for someone as experienced as Director of Programmes Sophie McKinlay, whose CV includes stints running such iconic cultural venues as the Tate, the Design Museum, Damien Hirst’s studio Science and the Whitechapel Gallery, V&A Dundee represents a remarkable opportunity.
‘There’s such a rich seam to mine in terms of telling and expanding the story of Scottish design,’ she says. ‘Kuma has described the museum as a living room to the city, a public
space where people can gather, rather like the living room at the heart of the home and what he has created in Dundee is a really warm welcoming space. He designed a building that acts like a gateway between Dundee and the world, and that’s really important.
‘We are rooted in Dundee, but Scotland has always been a very outward looking nation. Dundee was built on trade and we’ve got a museum right on the River Tay which was a site for the exchange of products and ideas which were made here and then traded globally.’
For McKinlay, the chance to showcase and champion items such as iconic architect Frank Gehry’s design for the Maggie’s Centre in Dundee has been a real privilege. ‘The V&A Dundee is all about having a discussion with people, with creating a sense of awe by showing how design has infiltrated every tiny corner of our lives,’ she says. ‘It’s a compelling story that I think people will love.’