IT IS ALL ABOUT
CLARITY AWARENESS
AND YOU.
Know your classics. USM conveys the timelessness of thoughtful reduction: structured space, classic design – unobtrusively elegant.
#usmmakeit yours NEW! Configure your individual piece of USM online! Available from selected USM UK Partners. Home: London Aram Store 020 7557 7557 Nottingham Atomic Interiors 0115 965 79 20 Oxford Central Living 01865 311 141 Stockport Innerform 0161 432 4040 Edinburgh Tangram Furnishers 0131 556 6551 Bournemouth So Furniture 01202 757600 Contract: London Aram Contracts 020 7240 3933, The Furniture Practice 0207 549 5454, Scott Howard 020 7724 1130, Wellworking 020 3110 0610 Manchester Ralph Capper Interiors 0161 236 6929 Irish Republic OHagan Design +353 1 535 8555 USM U. Schaerer Sons Ltd, 49 – 51 Central St London EC1V 8AB, 020 7183 3470, info.uk@usm.com
www.usm.com
Contents 54 Observation Yellow Inflatable Jacket, S/S17 by Balenciaga Industrial manufacture repurposed for fashion
161 Reviews
19 Timeline September to November 2016 in review
57 Observation Father, Son and Holy Spirit by Lars Frideen for Seeds Gallery The riddle of a plywood drinks cabinet
The Pacific Solution (166) Australia’s spatial politics of refusal
22 Photoessay Dionysos Natural and cultural landscape in an Athenian marble quarry
58 History A Childhood Utopia Alexander Girard’s wartime fantasy land
31
69 Comment The Unlifted Veil Decoding Google’s algorithms
9 Introduction The Collector of Cracks 14
Contributors
16 Masthead The people behind Disegno
Observation Spit Guard Pro by KIT Design Designing for restraint
32 Observation Ernö by Michael Marriott for the National Trust A plastic hook by way of Goldfinger 34 Conversation Collisions Zowie Broach and Sam Jacob reflect on the challenges facing design education 43 Comment Changing Frameworks Papal, legal and environmental paradigms for climate change 44 Comment Periods and Spaces The public infrastructure of the menstrual cup 46 Process But is it a Beetle? Reporting from the US Supreme Court hearing of Apple v. Samsung 53 Observation YEV-104 by Yamaha Material choices for an electric violin
No Man’s Sky (162) A video game reveals the perils of limitless creation
The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined (170) Uncovering the gendering at the root of vulgarity Death by Design (174) A documentary of horrors from the world of consumer electronics
70 Comment A few Chickens and a Parrot Legislation for drones
177 Project A History of Building The new Smithsonian museum tells the story of AfricanAmerican architecture
72 Report New Money Designing for digital in the age of dematerialised cash
193 Profile Machines for Noise Yuri Suzuki and the emergence of sound design
81 Travelogue A Capital in Exile Architectural field notes from the refugee camps of the Western Sahara
200 Anatomy 18th-Century Vernacular A history of the secretary desk, as interpreted by Michele De Lucchi
97 Project Contextual Illumination George Sowden’s plan to retire the lightbulb
204 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue
113 Special Project The Dream of Reality Laureline Galliot looks to A.A. Milne for new ways of seeing 129 Roundtable Somewhere Serious Making the new Design Museum 145 Portraits What Follows The impact of post-Brexit political rhetoric
Contents
208 Endnote Design Vocabulary: A Series of Interventions Linguistic confusion in Californian cityscapes
Dionysos Words Niki and Zoe Moskofoglou (On Entropy) Photographs Nikolas Ventourakis
Pentelic marble is a clear, white metamorphic rock filigreed with faint grey and green streaks. It is sourced from quarries on the slopes of Mount Pentelicus, some 40km north-east of Athens. An ancient quarry is located on the mountain’s southern slopes, while a modern one is found on the northern side at Dionysos. The quarry at Dionysos consists of both open-mining areas, where an almost blinding sun reflects off the white marble surface (one can hardly work without sunglasses) and underground mining stoas or caves. These manmade caves increase the volume of extractable material and, in contrast to open-pit excavation, reduce the visual impact on the landscape. The stoas are narrow, but about 40m high, and moving into them from a bright open-excavation area induces feelings of awe and fear. These responses are gradually salved as the stoa invites you to explore its depths. Dionysos is an industrial quarry providing marble for modern structures such as the Lotus Temple in New Delhi and Renzo Piano’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre in Athens. It is also a part of Greece’s historical and cultural identity. Greece’s relationship with marble dates back to the midneolithic period (5,800-5,300 BCE), and it has gone on to become one of the country’s most prominent mediums for artistic expression, helping to transfer principles of ancient Greek philosophy and its cultural ideals to the western world. The Acropolis, for instance, is constructed from Pentelic marble. The Dionysos quarry is both a natural and cultural landscape. In early agrarian societies, when people were dependent on the land for survival, culture and landscape were integrated. As industrialisation and urbanisation set in, coupled with a steady aestheticisation
of nature, this appears to have changed. The commodification of land has prompted a situation in which humans have become observers of landscape rather than an integral part of it. A contemporary understanding of a cultural landscape is one centred upon combined works of nature and society – sites that reflect the historical, religious, artistic or even technological values that humans have placed on a particular plot of land. Dionysos is a prime example. We were brought up in close proximity to the Dionysos quarry and the manner in which it has shaped Mount Pentelicus is imprinted on our memories. Marble, however, has moved beyond the landscapes from which it was hewn. As far back as 2,800 BCE, marble was used on the prehistoric Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea to create a series of smoothly polished idols: the Cycladic figurines. These sculptures were made from Parian or Naxos marble, a rock native to the northern Cyclades that is geologically identical to Pentelic marble. Both marbles are extracted from a single seam that extends from Attica to the northern Cyclades. The only distinction between the two is commercial. The Cycladic figurines were produced in a restricted region of the Greek archipelago, but archaeologists have since unearthed them across the wider Aegean region. The materiality of these artefacts has thereby become a way to trace trade, travel and migration routes across the ancient world. Given Europe’s present influx of dispossessed peoples and the way in which this has unfolded across Greece, Pentelic marble serves as a useful metaphor for the shifting social and cultural patterns caused by contemporary migration. We founded the marble atelier On Entropy in 2009 with the aim of investigating the wider significance
22
of Pentelic marble today. Marble can serve as a heavy construction material, but it still retains an impression of fragility and translucence. It can be manipulated to create artefacts that reflect its inherent material contradiction, while also prompting reflections on its geopolitical origins. When marble is processed – whether it is CNC-cut, carved or sculpted – a degree of randomness enters into proceedings. Our atelier experiments with this notion of entropy – we want to be loyal to the material’s history, but reframe its potential for contemporary society. For us, marble remains a deeply meaningful material. Pentelic marble offers a bridge between the natural and the built world. It also occupies the paradoxical place of being perceived as an essentially Greek material, while its historical traces actually map the movements and seepages of people and artefacts out of what we today call Greece. Investigating its natural and cultural characteristics, as well as its site of origin, creates an embodied understanding of place that confronts ideas of identity and belonging. On Entropy presented Utopian Landscape, a research project and installation focused on Dionysos and Pentelic marble, as the Greek entry for the 2016 London Design Biennale.
Photoessay
24
The marble at Dionysos is extracted from the parent rock with a method similar to that used 2,000 years ago. The means may be different – as timber wedges and manual labour are now replaced by wagon drills and diamond-wire saws – but the principle of employing the direction of natural fissures and veins for a smooth extraction is the same.
Photoessay
But is it a Beetle? Words Amber Winick Photograph Dean Kaufman
On the morning of 11 October, my Uber sped through Washington D.C., its radio tuned to a local station. I was in town to hear oral arguments for ‘Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple Inc.’, the first design-patent case heard in the US Supreme Court in over a century. “What’s up, Northeast!” the radio host exclaimed when a listener gave a shout-out to her home neighbourhood. As my cab pulled up to the court house, the caller’s voice was momentarily lost to static. “Are you calling from that Samsung Galaxy they told you to get off of?” the host teased, referring to the recent recall of the Galaxy Note 7, which has been found to overheat and explode. “Hell no,” the caller fired back. “I’m on an iPhone.” Even my ride to the US’s highest court seemed to vibrate with the great Apple/Samsung divide. 46
Process
The relationship between tech giants Apple and Samsung has long been contentious, but in 2011 the stakes were raised when Apple filed an action in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that 19 Samsung smartphone models infringed Apple’s design patents. After a 13-day trial in 2012, the jury found that 11 of Samsung’s smartphones did infringe the iPhone design patents, and Apple was entitled to $1.05bn – Samsung’s entire profits from those models. While that figure was later reduced, Apple was still left with $548m of Samsung’s profits. If that felt like a victory, however, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear Samsung’s appeal has left Apple on shaky ground. A Supreme Court win could result in Samsung getting much of its money back. Under US law, litigants don’t have an automatic right to be heard by the Supreme Court, which limits the cases it accepts in order to prioritise those that raise significant and potentially precedent-changing issues of law. In the case of Apple and Samsung, the justices’ decision – due by late June or early July 2017 – will not only determine Apple’s reward, but will also influence the future of design patents, how designers use them and how they are enforced. Unlike utility patents, which protect the way a product functions, design patents have historically safeguarded the visual aspects of a product, including its shape, configuration and surface ornamentation. In 1902, under 35 U.S.C. § 171 (a), congress stipulated that “[w]hoever invents any new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture may obtain a patent therefor”. The law mainly protected household items such as spoons, carpets and fireplace grates – typologies that received some of the earliest design patents – and the result of an infringement was simple: the infringer was required to turn over the entirety of its profits. Yet in the age of the smartphone, interpretation of the law is vague. A product can now include a variety of components, each protected by their own design patent, and design often bleeds into utility. As a result of the 2007 introduction of the iPhone, Apple obtained three design patents intended to protect various aspects of the device’s make‑up. Patents D’677 and D’087 cover the external portions of the phone: the rectangular, round-cornered face, the screen, aspect ratio, corner radii and “bezel”, the circular home button on the front. Design patent D’305, meanwhile, protects the iPhone’s graphical user interface (the grid of icons that appears on the screen’s display). The question before the Supreme Court is this: should a company that has infringed another brand’s design patent pay damages only for the component it used unlawfully, or should it be required to pay all of its profits on that product to the patent holder? In other words, the issue is no longer about whether Samsung copied Apple’s designs, but rather that Samsung wants to limit the amount of damages that a design infringer is required to pay. In its brief to the Supreme Court, Samsung argued that design patents are poorly suited to complex devices with many features, adding that they can give rise to disproportionate penalties. “This case presents the perfect vehicle for much-needed clarification by this court in an area of great importance to the national economy,” Samsung claimed. As soon as the oral argument began, it became clear that both sides would seize on a particular phrase from the 1902 statute: “article 48
An illustration from Patent D’087 representing the exterior design of the iPhone, May 2009.
of manufacture”. Samsung’s team argued that an “article of manufacture” could be a component of the whole, rather than the entire product sold to consumers. “A smartphone is smart because it contains hundreds of thousands of the technologies that make it work,” reasoned Kathleen Sullivan, Samsung’s lawyer. “A single design patent on a portion of the appearance of a phone should not entitle the design‑patent holder to all of the profit on the entire phone.” Sullivan went on to propose a test to determine what portion of profits can be attributable to a particular patented design. Samsung’s formula would require the patent holder to prove the entire profit on the product comes from a more narrowly defined article of manufacture protected by the design patent. This would be determined, she argued, by looking at production costs and commissioning expert testimony and consumer‑demand tests. The eight justices seemed amenable to limiting the award to profits attributable to the protected features, but also appeared to struggle with how to articulate the legal standard. “So we find out the production cost if [...] $1bn were spent on the inner parts and $100m was spent on the face, then it’s a 10:1 ratio,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy pondered. “That’s absolutely right, Your Honour,” replied Sullivan. Justice Kennedy continued, “Suppose you had a case where it’s a stroke of genius, the design.” He went on: “Suppose the Volkswagen Beetle design was done in three days, and it was a stroke of genius and it identified the car. Then it seems to me that that’s quite unfair to say: well, we give three days’ profit, but then it took 100,000 hours to develop the motor.” “If that’s so, it should be open to the patent-holder to prove the bulk of the profits come from the exterior of the car,” replied Sullivan. “It seems to me that the design is applied to the exterior case of the phone,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “It’s not applied to all the chips and wires.” He later suggested that “there shouldn’t be profits awarded based on the entire price of the phone.” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr questioned the idea that design might be the main driver of profit. “I can’t get over the thought that nobody buys a car, even a Beetle, just because they like the way it looks,” he said. “What if it cost $1,800 when it was first sold in the United States? What if it cost $18,000? What if it got two miles per gallon? What if it broke down every 50 miles?” Justice Stephen G. Breyer suggested that jurors could be given examples. “You know, wallpaper, you get the whole thing,” he said, referring to the idea that if a company infringes upon an entire design, they would deserve the entire profit that the infringing firm earned. “A Rolls Royce thing on the hood? No, no, no. You don’t get all the profit from the car.” This difficulty in articulating a clear standard suggests the nuance involved in deciding what “article of manufacture” means in the context of a patentable design. Apple’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, took a holistic approach. “Design is not a component and the patented design is not the article of manufacture,” said Waxman. “The patented design is something that’s applied to an article of manufacture.” Process
Patent 2344092 of the design for the Volkswagen Beetle, July 1939.
“Nobody buys a car, even a Beetle, just because they like the way it looks.” —Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr
New Money Barriers between the materialisation and digitalisation of finances are softening, so what role do design strategies play in shaping society’s conceptions of value and transaction? Words Tamar Shafrir Art Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena 72
On Tuesday 23 August 1994, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the artist group The K Foundation burned £1m. The action, named K Foundation Burn a Million Quid, took place on the Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, where it was filmed by their collaborator Gimpo (aka Alan Goodrick) and witnessed by freelance journalist Jim Reid. As Reid’s later article ‘Money to Burn’, published in The Observer, reported, “No one bank holds £1m in cash, so the K Foundation have hired a security firm to pick up the money from a NatWest bullion centre in Kent.” The money would be subsequently driven to the Redhill aerodrome, flown to the Inner Hebrides in a four-seater aeroplane, unpacked in a boathouse, lit on fire and destroyed over the course of two hours. “How would you watch £1m burn? With anger? With horror?” asked Reid. “I could tell you that you watch it at first with great guilt and then, after perhaps 10 minutes, boredom. And when the fire has gone out, you just feel cold.” This performance concluded a year-long process in which Cauty and Drummond debated how to best rid themselves of the money they had earned through music royalties from their earlier work as the electronica band The KLF: they toured the money around the USSR, gave some of it away and finally attempted to nail it to a board for a planned art exhibition called Money: A Major Body of Cash. Although no gallery agreed to stage the project, The K Foundation produced a preview catalogue that articulated its interest in the subject, asking questions like “How beautiful is money?” and speculating about the raw emotions inspired by its sight, sound and smell. At the same time, the Foundation acknowledged that it was dealing with a soon-to-be anachronism. As they later told Reid, “Money goes instantly around the world, we wanted to take it by hand, we were celebrating the end of cash.” It was a prescient farewell. Today, some 25 years on, more than 90 per cent of the world’s money exists only in electronic form. This shift towards non-materialised money has been momentous and throws up a host of questions, a number of them design-related. The physical form of coins and notes is responsible for many of our common conceptions around money: that it is finite, non-replicable, verifiable,
exchangeable and durable. These beliefs have become ingrained over 5,000 years of economic history, making money one of the main organising principles of human society. But as money grows less physical in a world governed by digital technologies, its behaviour no longer accords with our assumptions. The K Foundation’s burning of 20,000 £50 notes may have been shocking, but it was also easily achievable – at least in a physical sense. By contrast, eradicating £1m from a digital account – destroying it completely, with no trace and no recipient – is nearly impossible. Although non-physical money is easier to track than cash, it nonetheless requires a form of mediation or interaction to be accessed and spent, and these interactions are as much a question of design as of finance. As physical and virtual forms of currency continue to coexist, their designs influence one another, giving rise to increasingly hybrid manifestations. Almost all currencies in circulation today are fiat money: that is, currencies established by national governments. Before the 20th century, however, money took different forms. Commodity money, such as the barley used in Babylonia 4,000 years ago, had its own value as an object or material. Representative money, meanwhile, was a record of ownership for commodities held in store elsewhere, like a tally stick or gold certificate. Fiat money, by contrast, is only as valuable as governments and markets say it is. This value may be consciously manipulated through processes such as quantitative easing or changes in interest rates, while political events or governmental instability can also have unintended impacts on its worth. In either case, the form of money stays the same, even as its equivalent power to buy another product rises or falls. Despite this, coins and banknotes are designed to simulate intrinsic value in visual and material ways. Coins, for instance, imitate the shininess of precious metals, although they tend to be redesigned once their material value oversteps their nominal value. The British penny was minted from copper until 1970 and bronze until 1991, but since then it has been made from copper-plated steel to reduce the use of more valuable metals (at various points in the 2000s, the copper penny was worth more than 1p). Meanwhile, banknotes tend to increase in size to imply a corresponding increase in value: the €10 banknote is 7mm wider and 5mm taller than the
Report
€5 banknote, and each subsequent denomination grows by similar increments. Banknotes also have a texture and strength unlike other papers we encounter in our daily lives. They are produced from unique textile fibres or polymers and printed with opalescent holograms, signatures, official symbols and numerical codes. A considerable amount of money is actually counterfeit – at least 3 per cent of all pound coins, for instance – but despite this our trust in the signs of authentic value projected by physical currency is not shaken. In his 2016 London Review of Books essay ‘When Bitcoin Grows Up’, the journalist and author John Lanchester ably summarised the form that most money now takes. “What it is instead [of cash] is entries on a ledger,” he wrote. “It’s numbers on your bank balance, the electronic records of debits and credits that are created every time we spend money.” Debit cards, credit cards, smart cards and online banking have become vital points of access to the flow of 24-hour digital transactions that govern the global economy, but the new financial reality seems to have affected cash too, with a growing tendency for even the physical appearance of currencies to
would seem, is adopting the visual language of the format which is likely to one day replace it. Less immediately graspable than this form of aesthetic homage, however, is the intersection between graphic design and the complex security features embedded in banknotes. With the increasing ubiquity of image-editing software and reproduction machines, sophisticated graphic elements have had to be introduced into banknote design in order to prevent their reproduction by counterfeiters. Such work is overseen by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group (CBCDG), an association of 32 central banks and note‑printing authorities that supports and deploys secret technologies to prevent the digital reproduction of currency. In 2002, Markus Kuhn, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, discovered that the CBCDG was using a counterfeiting-prevention method that he called the “EURion constellation”, a specific arrangement of five coloured circles (now printed on almost all major currencies) that are automatically picked up by photocopiers. Once the constellation has been detected, the photocopier will not function. Two years later, Kuhn’s student Steven Murdoch investigated other detection methods, discovering a digital watermark that had been developed by the technology company Digimarc and embedded in banknotes. This watermark can be identified by image-editing software such as Photoshop, which is programmed not to open any file containing it. Such technologies show that one of the key design territories in physical currencies is actually invisible to the naked eye. Central to the functioning of both Kuhn’s constellation and Murdoch’s watermark is that they are so completely integrated into the design of the banknote as to only be reliably readable by machines. It’s a development that brings to mind the “New Aesthetic”, a phrase coined by designer James Bridle in 2011 to refer to the overlaps between the digital and physical realms. “For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder,” wrote Bridle, “but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures.” Bridle was not writing about finance, but the general tendency that he observed also applies to the way in which we materialise money. In the spirit of the New Aesthetic, we are beginning to adopt and adapt the design of banknotes and coins to machine vision. This process is giving rise to curious
Physical money, it would seem, is adopting the visual language of the format which is likely to one day replace it. adopt a more virtual logic. While the detailed texture of banknotes once referred to the heavy paper of official documents and certificates, some currencies – such as the Romanian leu and the new British £5 note – now incorporate transparent windows reminiscent of digital screens. Other currencies allude to the digital more obliquely. The latest Norwegian kroner notes, to be released in 2017, feature traditional national symbols, insignia and signatures on their fronts, but the backs have been designed by the architecture studio Snøhetta and dispense with any figurative imagery in place of colourful, pixellated fields. “We wanted to play with the thought that maybe this would be the last banknote to be designed because of the coming of the digital age,” said Martin Gran, the managing director of Snøhetta’s brand design division in a 2014 interview with Disegno. Physical money, it
74
The imagery accompanying this article are computer simulations taken from Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena’s Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium (2001-ongoing). The Black Shoals project visualises the dynamics of the world stock markets as a night sky, with stellar activity dictated by real-time trading data.
Shall I go off to South America? Shall I put in my ship to sea? Or get in my cage and be lions and tigers? Or – shall I be only Me?
128
Somewhere Serious A roundtable with the Design Museum’s Justin McGuirk, Morag Myerscough, John Pawson and Deyan Sudjic, chaired by Vicky Richardson.
Photographs Max Creasy Roundtable
The Commonwealth Institute, designed by RMJM in 1962. It has now been revamped by Allies and Morrison, OMA, and John Pawson, and reopens as the new Design Museum in November 2016.
130
London’s Design Museum has a new home three times the size of its previous building in Shad Thames, east London. The former Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park, a listed building designed in the 1960s by RMJM, has been transformed by the designer John Pawson, creating a space that the team behind it hopes will allow it to expand its remit within contemporary design. The museum has huge ambitions, not least in the number of visitors it needs to attract to generate income. Tasked with drawing visitors to the new site are its chief curator Justin McGuirk, as well as Morag Myerscough, the designer behind the exhibition display for the permanent collection. Vicky Richardson, the former director of architecture, design and fashion at the British Council, met with the museum’s director Deyan Sudjic, as well as McGuirk, Myerscough and Pawson, shortly before the opening to ask about the vision behind the institution and how its various departments have worked together to make it a reality. Also present at the table were four objects chosen for their significance to each participant’s thinking about the new Design Museum.
Roundtable
Vicky Richardson Why is it necessary to have a new Design Museum? Deyan Sudjic We wanted something that would provide us with the kind of facilities that would allow us to move from being on the edge of a conversation to being at the heart of it. When Habitat floated on the stock market in the early 1980s, our founder Terence Conran used some of that money to begin this crusade to remind Britain of the idea of design rooted in mass production. Initially he funded the Boilerhouse project inside the V&A, with Stephen Bayley as the first director, which was trying to remind the V&A that although it had become an exquisite museum of decorative arts, it began life as something else. I was appointed 10 years ago, when the trustees had already decided the time was right to do something on a larger scale. We wanted to move from 3,000sqm to about 10,000sqm. Morag Myerscough The old site was just too small. The spaces were limiting for exhibitions and you didn’t have the conditions that you’ve got in the new space, which ought to provide a lot more scope. I think that this building will take the exhibitions to another level, much as the Barbican’s galleries changed a lot when it was refurbished in the mid-2000s. Vicky With that in mind, how do you want to change the conversation about design in this country? Aren’t we already quite obsessed with it? Deyan Contemporary design and architecture are usually discussed in two ways. One is in peripheral organisations, in which small, specialist work is done. Alternatively, they are covered as a department in a general museum, where they have to fight for space. So our strategy is to try and move from being small but perfectly formed to something more mainstream. We want to move from 250,000 to 650,000 visitors a year, of whom we hope approximately half will buy tickets to our exhibitions. And we want to reverse the typical strategy of nationally funded museums, which is to have 75 per cent of their space dedicated to the collection and a quarter devoted to temporary exhibitions. We’re doing it the other way round. Justin McGuirk In its first incarnations, the Design Museum was very much about brands and people. Throughout the history of 20th-century design, the individual – the designer – was foremost and so the Design Museum has historically celebrated many individual geniuses, which it will continue to do. But there’s a sense now that design is not just about the
individual, but rather a collective process and that idea is starting to filter up to a museum level. The Design Museum has always played a role in making design a popular and accessible topic. The very first exhibition at the old Shad Thames site, Commerce and Culture, was at pains to point out that everyday industrially produced objects are indistinguishable from culture and that the culture of making things to sell is not that different from a form of art. That was a very 1980s, postmodern position, which removed the distinctions between high and low. Thirty years later, however, we have totally absorbed that idea. Ours is a society that already very much appreciates design, both culturally and commercially. So it’s time for a different conversation. Vicky With these considerations in mind, what brought you to the former Commonwealth Institute? There was quite a long period of exploring different sites, as well as a conversation with the Tate. Deyan And one with the V&A and one with Potters Fields and one with Kings Cross; Gordon Brown even suggested that if we wanted to go to Manchester there would be no obstacles in our path. But it was opportunism that brought us here. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea said that it wanted to use the planning powers it had to bring the Commonwealth Institute back to life. I had known the building as a child, but when I first saw it again I wondered whether it was actually feasible to bring it back from the dead: there was a lake inside, the roof leaked and the walls were hopelessly inefficient. It was a listed building, so before taking it on we had to be confident that English Heritage would allow it to be adapted to make it work for our purposes. John Pawson Deyan and I walked in at the very beginning of the process, when the building was a damp, doom-like place, but you could still see the potential. Deyan The developer of the site, Chelsfield, had organised an architectural competition that was won by OMA, whose masterplan was very much about the geometry of the neighbouring apartment buildings that they have created. But planning consent was predicated on Chelsfield having a cultural partner on board, so we became linked to the project. That section in the agreement asks for affordable housing or another cultural good. There’s no affordable housing, but we are the cultural good and so we have a 300-year rent-free lease on the building. About
132
The grade II-listed building has a hyperbolic paraboloid roof that has been restored as part of the renovation.
Roundtable
£20m of work was carried out by Chelsfield on this building before it was handed to us, which was basically making it fit-for-purpose in terms of keeping the rain out, energy efficiency, putting in new floors and constructing two levels in the basement. John But in spite of that I still couldn’t understand the building when we went there because there were no windows. You couldn’t look out and so you were immediately disorientated. To help, I got a model and as soon as I took the roof off I realised that the building was actually a simple square box. Everything I do is about designing things around the way people use a place or a building. I realised that being able to see the roof when you walked in was key – the whole design became about how to integrate that. This is my first public building, and my first building with free access. Architecture takes a long time and throughout you’re dealing with so many issues that you keep your head down. So it wasn’t until recently, when Terence Conran had his birthday in the atrium, that I realised that we’re now in the moment between all of the construction and the project actually being finished. It’s quite emotional. Deyan The first Monday after we moved into the new office there was a sense of wow. I think people thought that a Pawson interior might be something like a stylistic, off the peg solution, but it’s far from being that. There was a sense that people suddenly understood how the acoustics were going to work, how they could hang their coat, how the lights function. It had all been thought about, not in a stylistic way, but in a what’s-it-going-to-belike‑to‑work-here way. Justin What John has done is create a context in which anything can happen, which I find helpful to think about as an ethos rather than a style. We want the building to do several things and we want people to enjoy it as soon as they walk in. That moment of entering the atrium and looking up is spectacular. But in my specific role as curator, I am working with an 870sqm gallery which, with the best will in the world, could have been designed by any number of architects because it’s essentially a white box – the basis of exhibition making. But I appreciate the fact that it isn’t trying to be more than that. Many architects are now creating galleries that are highly expressive places, but those are actually quite difficult to work around, as you see the architecture and not the exhibits.
John Pawson selected a model of the building to illustrate his thinking around the renovation of its interior.
134
The 10 year-long project has been conceived as a collaboration between a number of partners, including Pawson and designer Morag Myerscough.
Vicky For me, the noticeable thing about the new museum is how orthogonal it is compared to the old Commonwealth Institute, which was all about curves and had a certain sort of playfulness with ramps and staircases connecting different platforms. John I always felt that the building’s interior was very disorientating and that it was confusing to have so many things off a central dial. Now, as soon as you walk inside, you see the soaring roof, but you can still orientate yourself very quickly because you have visual lines to the temporary exhibition spaces and to Morag’s permanent exhibition space at the top of the building. If you turn around, you can see the education spaces, the restaurant and the café – they are all very visible. The other thing that I did was to open the windows so that you can see Holland Park on two sides. Vicky But in order to access the museum, you either come through the park or, if you’re coming from the high street, you go through the portico of one of OMA’s
apartment buildings. That means that the museum’s main presence on the street is its shop, which is based in the OMA building. So how are you going to give the Design Museum visibility? John I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, but I think coming off of the high street and having that decompression of going through the OMA building and then coming out the other side is interesting. Of course, coming into it from the park is a very different experience. But you wouldn’t be able to build 10,000sqm in a park in any other central area of London. Morag I actually like the lead-in and the way it’s set back as if it’s its own environment. Justin Yes, I don’t see the context as a problem. This is how you can make a new museum – largely unfunded by government – in London in the 21st century: the museum is going to be occupying an extraordinary building that is three times the size of the original one, and that could only happen in this kind of context.
Roundtable