1.5 The Growing Popularity of Design Exhibitions

surveys of the culture and industry of design during the 1990s and 2000s. From 2011 to 2014, a series of papers were published by the Architecture, Design, Fashion department. The ADF papers invited critics and curators to explore new directions in British architecture, design and fashion through specific themes or a series of case studies. Subjects included design collectives, fashion as installation, sustainability in design, 3D printing and social design and the papers did much to bring attention to the current and emerging debates in contemporary design.122 Campbell went on to become Head of Design at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) where she continued to focus attention on the promotion and debate of design and its emergent issues.

1.5 The Growing Popularity of Design Exhibitions

From the 1980s, exhibitions were seen by museums as a major way to generate external income, build the museum’s brand and attract larger visitor numbers. The growing demand for contemporary exhibition programming started to offer new opportunities to curators that were independent of collection responsibilities. It was the expansion of this role that was to lead to wide-ranging changes in contemporary curatorial practice. It also suggested new roles for the design curator, in curating exhibitions and displays that communicated what was happening in contemporary culture but also in bringing new thinking to the museum’s collections.

The years leading up to the millennium saw the creation of a number of large-scale design exhibitions that presented intriguing and innovative concepts in engaging ways. Curators started to experiment with new formats and new approaches. Significantly the exhibitions were curated by individuals or agencies operating outside the institutional context of the museum and who were described by Design Week in 2001 as “a new

122

ADF Papers, published by the British Council’s Architecture, Design, Fashion department, were launched on 28 July 2011. Available at: https://design.britishcouncil.org/ blog/2011/jul/28/launch-adf-papers/ (Accessed 25.10.18).

breed of curators.”123 Restructure was established in 1999 by Libby Sellers and Helen Evenden, graduates of the MA Design History programme at the Royal College of Art, run jointly with the V&A. The curatorial agency provided design and architecture-related content for a variety of clients and institutions including RIBA, Habitat, L’Oreal, Wordsearch and the Design Council. As part of a month long design festival, UKinNY, Restructure were commissioned by the Design Council to curate a major touring exhibition, Great Expectations: New British Design Stories to be installed in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, Vanderbilt Hall.

The exhibition featured over one hundred examples of “ground-breaking British design” that included an ultra-chic dog house, fashion that travelled as an air-mail envelope, an aluminium bicycle that glowed in the dark and a self chilling drink can. Acclaimed design team Casson Mann were responsible for designing the installation and sought to create one single structure that would fill the space, but which would also create a setting for dialogue. Taking their inspiration from the banquet scene in Charles Dickens’ classic novel, Great Expectations, the exhibition presented examples of design excellence laid out on a vast glowing table. The exhibition invited visitors to take a seat and, through speakers and screens set into the chairs and table, learn more about the ideas that inspired the creations and the processes behind the objects on display. Graphics were integrated by placing text-like speech bubbles relating to nearby objects. Theatre lights were installed around the edge of the exhibition space to flood colour across the marble walls and into the huge windows to announce to 42nd street that something exciting was happening within the station building. The exhibition subsequently toured to the Far East, Australia and North America and won a number of awards.

123

‘Structure this’, Design Week, 2 August 2001. Available at: https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/2-august-2001/structure-this/ (Accessed 15.01.18).

Fig. 13: Great Expectations installed at New York’s Grand Central Station, 1999. Curated by Restructure, Exhibition design: Casson Mann.

The exhibition was notable for its innovative curatorial and design approach but also for the future career trajectory of its curators, Libby Sellers and Helen Evenden. In 2001 Sellers joined the Design Museum as a curator and went on to curate exhibitions on designers Marc Newson, Peter Saville and a celebration of the life and work of Eileen Gray. She also oversaw the museum’s annual Designer of the Year and Design Mart exhibitions. In 2007 she left the Design Museum to open her own gallery space in west London commissioning and selling the work of contemporary designers. Evenden went on to tutor in automative design at the Royal College of Art before joining the Design Museum as Head of Education in 2003.

Since the millennium, the number, range and scale of design exhibitions has increased dramatically in the UK. Increasingly museums and venues that have traditionally presented exhibitions focusing on fine art or the decorative arts have started to realise the potential of the design exhibition to reach a wider audience and increasingly have brought design into their

programmes. Since the late 1990s, London venues such as the V&A, the Barbican and Somerset House have staged exhibitions that have attracted substantial audiences. In 1998 the first design exhibition entered the Barbican’s exhibition programme. The Art of the Harley (22 January - 28 April 1998) featured over thirty customised Harley Davidson motorcycles. Other design exhibitions followed including The World of Charles and Ray Eames (21 October 2015 - 14 February 2016) and Bauhaus: Art as Life (3 May - 12 August 2012). Today the Barbican describes its visual arts programme as embracing art, architecture, design, fashion, photography and film.124

Similarly, Somerset House promotes a programme of major exhibitions covering a broad contemporary remit including architecture, design, fashion, music and photography. Claire Catterall, Director of Exhibitions and, like Sellers and Evenden, a former graduate of the MA History of Design at the RCA, worked as an independent curator throughout the 1990s and was responsible for a number of high profile design exhibitions including Powerhouse::UK: British Creativity Now in Horse Guards Parade (1998); Stealing Beauty: British Design Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1999) and Food: Design and Culture for Glasgow 1999. In 2000 she co-founded Scarlet Projects with Sarah Gaventa, also a graduate of the RCA Design History programme. The agency established a reputation for innovative work that brought design and architecture to a wider public. They also pioneered a new approach to commissioning and curating installations, offering a strategy which saw exhibitions, installations and events in public spaces, commercial and business settings, as well as in museums and galleries. Clients were also wide ranging and included The British Council, The V&A, Science Museum, Wellcome Trust, Selfridges and Bloomberg, and their work extended from London to Berlin and Tokyo.

In 2012 Catterall was appointed Director of Exhibitions at Somerset

124

Barbican website. Available at: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/our-programme/ visual-arts. (Accessed 20.10.17).

House. Since taking up the role she has brought a distinctive programme of design exhibitions to the galleries, including: SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution (17 September - 23 December 2009); Maison Martin Margiela 20 the exhibition (3 June - 5 September 2010); Tim Walker Storyteller (18 October 2012 - 27 January 2013); Valentino: Master of Couture (29 November 2012 - 3 March 2013); Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (20 November 2013 - 2 March 2014); Big Bang Data (3 December 2015 - 20 March 2016) and Hair by Sam McKnight (2 November 2016 - 12 March 2017). Catterall also devised and curated the venue’s acclaimed annual contemporary graphic art fair, Pick Me Up. 125

During the 2000s, the practice of design curating was starting to expand outside of the museum and gallery. It was extending to new sites of practice and became a key area of practice in the rapidly changing fields of contemporary science and health care. As Catherine McDermott has described, curators and directors at the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust were commissioning curators, artists and designers to communicate the complexities of modern science and technology to the widest audience. Examples include the Wellcome Trust’s ground-breaking exhibitions at Euston Road, ranging across the human heart, hygiene, and mental health. At the Science Museum, curated family sleepovers were introduced and the art collective Superflex’s Cockroach Tour used performance art to explain climate change. In 1996, the first Maggie’s Centre opened its groundbreaking support for cancer patients commissioning contemporary architects and designers to create an environment for high quality health care.126

Perhaps the most visible expression of a rising public interest in design and an awareness of design's increasing economic value was the establishment of the London Design Festival (LDF) in 2003. LDF was

125

Somerset House website. Available at: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk. (Accessed 20.10.17).

126

Catherine McDermott, ‘Curating Contemporary Design - 20 Years of Change’, The Design Journal, Volume 20, 2017, Issue 3: 307 - 312.

conceived by Sir John Sorrell, former Chair of the Design Council and Ben Evans, a graduate of the MA History of Design at the RCA and formerly content editor for the exhibition spaces at the Millennium Dome in 2000. Their concept was to create an annual event that would promote the city’s creativity, drawing in the country’s greatest thinkers, practitioners, retailers and educators “to deliver an unmissable celebration of design”. London Design Festival would celebrate and promote London as the design capital of the world. The launch of the first Festival took place at Bloomberg on 25 March 2003, with a huge show of support from design, education, government and business.127

A review of the early years of the Festival reveals a steady increase in scale and ambition. By 2004 the London Design Festival had doubled in size and in 2005 it had become part of London’s cultural calendar with Gordon Brown praising it for “cradling the British genius.” In 2006 the Festival was opened by Sir Terence Conran and attended by over 300,000 people. Whilst the V&A had always had a small involvement, from 2009 the V&A became the hub for the London Design Festival. Since then its involvement has grown with a programme of commissions and exhibitions that take place at the museum during the Festival. In 2007 LDF commissioned its first Landmark Project, the inaugural London Design Medal which was awarded to the architect Zaha Hadid. Distinct ‘design districts’ began to emerge where leading international brands, independent retailers, neighbourhood restaurants and cultural institutions joined forces “with a view to revitalising the heritage of the area as a place where people come together to share, enjoy and learn about design in its broadest sense; design, culture, fashion and food.”128 In 2018 there are nine design districts with the Festival commissioning high profile designers and architects, as well as emerging talents, to create installations in some of London’s most prominent spaces, including the V&A and Trafalgar

127

London Design Festival website. Available at: https://www.londondesignfestival.com/ what-london-design-festival (Accessed 20.10.18).

Ibid.: Available at https://www.londondesignfestival.com/design-districts (Accessed

128

20.10.18).

Square. LDF promoted London as a centre for contemporary design to a global audience. It also represented a new platform for curatorial practice, generating new roles for the curator developing programmes and events for the festival that were outside of the museum and gallery.

In the same way that the design exhibition and the design festival did much to open up the subject of contemporary design to an expanded audience, the design journal also helped to map, label and define the new and unfamiliar territories of design, style and taste during a period of intense interest in such topics. Jeremy Myerson has described the 1980s as “a schizophrenic decade” when Britain presented a picture of design in all its “schizophrenic glory”. For Myerson, it was the decade of The Face, the Lloyds Building, Next and the Channel 4 logo and a time of innovation, ambition and restless entrepreneurialism.129 New magazines were launched with the intention of surveying and critically assessing developments in the design sector.

Launched in 1983, Blueprint was the first magazine to address both architecture and design. It was established by architect Peter Murray and edited by design critic, Deyan Sudjic, with the financial backing of leading architects and designers including Terence Conran, Rodney Fitch, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The range of subject matter and the magazine’s tabloid format, designed by art director Simon Esterson, was influenced by the content of the New York-based magazine, Metropolis, established in 1981.130 In B is for Bauhaus, Sudjic recalls the early ambitions for the magazine:-

“Blueprint set out to be iconoclastic, disposable, and tried to root architecture, design, graphics, fashion and the visual world in the popular culture of the time.”131

129

Jeremy Myerson, ‘A schizophrenic decade’ in ‘Best of British: 1960-1999 Four Decades of Design’, The Observer in association with D&AD, 1999: 16.

Metropolis website. Available at: https://www.metropolismag.com/about-metropolis/

130 (Accessed 20.10.18).

131 Deyan Sudjic, B is for Bauhaus, London: Penguin Books, 2014: 43.

Blueprint positioned itself as London’s leading magazine of architecture and design and offered a fresh and unconventional approach aimed at keeping readers updated on the latest styles and trends in the design community. Profiles of designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Katherine Hamnett, Paul Smith and Issey Miyake, together with articles on nightclubs restaurants and boutique hotels, offered an opportunity to examine a range of design disciplines from fashion to car design, and to explore new centres of design such as Tokyo that were making an impact on the design industry. The magazine was also unique in featuring portrait photographs of designers, rather than products or buildings, on its covers and by so doing, conferring an almost celebrity status on their subjects.132 This interest in the individual designer was reflected in the ongoing dominance of monographic design exhibitions at museums, a factor that will be discussed in more detail in relation to the development of the Design Museum, London in Chapter 3.

132

Past editors of Blueprint have included; Rowan Moore, formerly director of the Architecture Foundation; Marcus Field, formerly arts editor of The Independent on Sunday and now founder and editor of Dezeen and Vicky Richardson, formerly Director of the Architecture, Design, Fashion department at the British Council, London.

Fig. 14: Front cover of Blueprint, Number 98, June 1993.

Other new publications dedicated to design, advertising and marketing were launched during this period and also helped to open up design to a wider audience. Creative Review launched in 1980, Design Week in 1996 and Wallpaper was launched in 1996 by journalists Tyler Brûlé and Alexander Geringer. Alice Twemlow has noted the important role of these independent design publications describing them as “public sites of debate and exchange”.133

Many youth culture and style magazines aimed at a more populist market were launched during the period such as The Face, Sky, Blitz and Arena. Alongside music and fashion, the magazines carried features on design. The May 1985 issue of The Face featured articles on contemporary architecture, profiles of designers Nigel Coates and Ron Arad and the magazine’s art director Neville Brody. The June 1985 issue carried a profile of design entrepreneur, Terence Conran, who would establish the Design Museum in 1989.134

New television programmes also helped to open up the subject of design to non-specialist audiences. In 1981 the BBC launched a series of Horizon programmes titled Little Boxes about design and scientific thinking written and presented by design critic, Stephen Bayley and directed by television producer, Patrick Uden. It featured interviews with industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy and Dieter Rams. In 1986 the BBC Design Awards, presented by media personality Janet Street Porter, attempted to engage viewers by inviting them to vote for their favourite example of contemporary design. The BBC also began a Design Classics series in 1987 commissioned by Alan Yentob with thirty minute episodes fronted by design experts, that included Penny Sparke, discussing the design and impact of products such as the Volkswagen Beetle, Sony Walkman,

133

Alice Twemlow, Sifting the Trash: A history of design criticism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017: 138.

134 The Face, May 1985 and June 1985, the Design Museum Archives, London.