The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Inside Britain’s new temple to good taste
The Design Museum has made an £80million move to a once-derided Sixties building. But what’s with the Marigolds, asks Jonathan Glancey
Sixty years ago, the Duke of Edinburgh opened the Design Centre at 28 Haymarket, a minute’s walk from Piccadilly Circus. In its first week, more than 22,000 people swarmed to this temple of good taste, to gawp at 1,000 well-designed products, from typefaces to televisions, all of them made in Britain.
The initiative came from the Council of Industrial Design, which, like Lord Reith’s BBC, set out to inform, educate and even entertain a nation that, freed from ration books at last, was falling for the “we’ve never had it so good” world of hedonistic consumerism.
In the Eighties, the role of the Design Centre was usurped by the Design Museum, which had begun life a few years earlier, under the impetus of Terence Conran, as the Boilerhouse Project, in a white-tiled bunker within the V&A Museum. It was soon granted its own premises in a former banana warehouse at Conran’s Butler’s Wharf development, south-east of Tower Bridge, and in 1989 Margaret Thatcher reopened it as the Design Museum.
The new museum attracted five million visitors to more than a hundred exhibitions. These covered everything from architecture to jewellery, from eroticism to Constance Spry, inventor of coronation chicken, who popularised offsetting blooms with plainer vegetation such as pussy willow in flower arrangements. There were also at least three exhibitions devoted entirely to chairs.
“Thirty years ago, you could have convincingly told the story of contemporary design through a selection of carefully chosen chairs,” says Deyan Sudjic, the Museum’s director since 2006.
“People still want to see our chairs, but design is a much wider story than material objects alone [can tell]. It’s about the way that the digital explosion, for example, has transformed every aspect of life.”
As design and the issues surrounding it became ever more complex and neurotic, so the Design Museum outgrew its riverside home, which closed this summer, after 27 years. On Monday, Prince Philip – a resolute champion of good modern design – will open the Museum’s new premises, in the former Commonwealth Institute on Kensington High Street.
This fascinating building, opened by the Queen in 1962, has been both celebrated and decried for its swooping, copper-clad hyperbolic paraboloid roof. Now remodelled by the architect John Pawson, this is where the nation will come to witness how design and architecture continue to evolve, and the ways they affect our lives.
“You get a sense of this in our opening exhibition, Fear and Love,” says Sudjic. “It’s an immersive installation exploring both the possibilities and the anxieties design is causing – from the loss of privacy implied by the smartphone to worries we have about artificial intelligence supplanting humanity.”
Although the museum’s new home is three times the size of the old site, its finely honed interior is low key and even unassuming. “I suppose it feels a bit like a home,” says Pawson. “The level of detailing is domestic, intimate. I wanted it to be a place you’d come to even if you weren’t particularly interested in design. It’s up to the curators to woo audiences, and to create all the excitement and colour they want in the galleries, but anyone should feel comfortable here.”
While the triple-height lobby of the museum is a dramatic affair, stretching up to the underside of that bravura Sixties roof, its walls and galleries are lined with plain, yet warm, oak panels. Everywhere – from café and shop to emergency stairs – there are calm, discreetly signed spaces that feel all of an intelligent piece. Except for the captivating roof, little remains of the original building.
As fate would have it, the new £80million Design Museum is almost too discreet. To help pay for it, blocks of “luxury” flats, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, dominate the site. While Pawson has integrated fragments of the building’s original interior – stained glass by Keith New, white marble floors that are now walls – the relationship between the building and the high street has been sacrificed. But, then, in an era when private enterprise has taken the role of public patronage, how could things be otherwise?
Most of the 650,000 annual
‘Thirty years ago, you could have told the story of design through chairs alone’