Culture

numbers of 1.5 million, the twenty-three exhibitions it presented over five years proved to be some of the more successful in London. Writing in 2016, Charles Saumarez Smith, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), London, recalls the Boilerhouse Project “which was no more than a creative cell in the basement of the V&A where Stephen Bayley held court in a glass office surrounded by piles of magazines” and remembers the exhibitions as being “lively and very inventive.”306 For Bayley, “they tapped and thereby demonstrated the existence of a massive latent interest in design” supporting Conran’s rationale for a permanent museum devoted to the study of industrial design.307

3.2 The Design Museum at Shad Thames: Commerce and Culture

In 1981, Terence Conran led a consortium to win the bid for a mixed-use development at Butler’s Wharf, a thirteen acre site on the south bank of the River Thames. The search for possible locations for the new Design Museum began as early as 1984. In 1986 Conran moved the Boilerhouse Project to the area. The site chosen for the new museum was a derelict 1950s banana-ripening warehouse on the riverfront in a location overlooking Tower Bridge and across from the City of London. The building was converted by Richard Doone of Conran Roche and created space for two floors of exhibition galleries, education and events spaces, as well as a cafe and a restaurant overlooking the river.

Doone devised a scheme that stripped back the brickwork and used the steel structure to create a simple, white walled building with generous balconies that was deliberately reminiscent of the International Style of the 1930s exemplified by the Bauhaus and which stood in direct contrast to the Victorian warehouses along the riverfront. Stephen Bayley later

306

Liz Farrelly presents an account of Stephen Bayley’s trajectory from ‘enfant terrible’ and journalist to curator and director of the Boilerhouse Gallery in ‘Media in the Museum: Fashioning the Design Curator at the Boilerhouse Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London’ in Leah Armstrong and Felice McDowell (eds.), Fashioning Identities: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

307

Tom Wilson, Tom (ed.) Designs of Our Times: 10 Years of Designs of the Year, London: the Design Museum, 2017: 29.

recalled that people would often refer to the museum as ‘Bauhaus on Thames.’ Barbara Usherwood’s detailed description of the Design Museum in 1991 describes the renovated warehouse in Shad Thames as a skin-deep simulacrum of modernism with ocean-liner decks, a faux corporate reception desk and pristine marble and white interiors.308

Fig. 32: 1. The Design Museum prior to refurbishment in 1986; 2. Following refurbishment in 1989.

An early promotional brochure produced by the Design Museum set out a bold ambition for the new museum:-

“In a building of outstanding architectural character and quality on a remarkable site close to London’s financial centre, the Design Museum will offer a range of resources which designers, industry and business may draw on to create better products, while providing a stimulating environment in which to view, experience and evaluate design. When the Design Museum opens in Spring 1989 it will take the concept of the museum out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century.”309

The brochure states that the museum would house a permanent study collection of noteworthy design from the industrial revolution to the age of electronics with products supported by information about marketing, materials and performance which enables an object to be understood in context. In 1989, in his regular editorial column in Blueprint, Deyan Sudjic praised Bayley’s approach pointing out that many institutions show objects

308

Barbara Usherwood, ‘The Design Museum: Form Follows Funding’, Design Issues Vol.7 No.2, 1991: 76-87.

309

The Conran Foundation, The Design Museum at Butler’s Wharf promotional brochure, undated, the Design Museum Archives, London.

as art, whereas Stephen Bayley wanted to put objects into context.310

Drawing on the experience of the Foundation’s successful Boilerhouse Project in the V&A, the new Design Museum would provide a unique range of resources for students, professional designers, industry and commerce. In its permanent collection, temporary exhibitions, continuously changing reviews, lecture programmes and study facilities, the Design Museum recognises that “industry is our culture.”311 It was recognised that design was not one subject, but many - furniture, packaging, office equipment, transport and leisure. Disciplines included materials science, ergonomics, mechanical engineering and styling, the range of expression covered elegance, utility, function, and fashion.

From the beginning, the museum was deliberately international in outlook. In 1988 Conran and Bayley set up an International Advisory Council. The participants included directors of design institutions such as the Design Arts Programme at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, the Taideteollisuusmuseo in Helsinki and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.312 By so doing, it was hoped that the museum would be able to benefit from best practice in Europe and the US. The role of the council was to advise on themes, issues and developments in design that might influence the exhibition and education programmes at the new museum. The first meeting of the Council took place on 12 April 1988 with the purpose of briefing members about plans for the new museum and an opportunity to discuss every aspect of its programme with the director and staff. In addition, the Design Museum invited to the meeting two British designers, Dinah Casson and Richard Seymour, and a writer on architecture and design, Deyan Sudjic, then editor of Blueprint magazine who would become a future director of the museum.

310 Deyan Sudjic, Editorial, Blueprint, July / August 1989.

311

Stephen Bayley, Design Museum Hymn Sheet, 24 June 1987, the Design Museum Archives, London.

312

Design Museum International Advisory Council, First Meeting: Agenda and briefing notes, 12 April 1988, the Design Museum Archives, London.

From the outset, the Design Museum was vocal about its position as an independent institution whose purpose was “to increase public understanding of industrial society through the study of the artefacts it produces.”313 It was also clear that it would not endorse a notion of good design or taste, in an attempt to distance itself from the position communicated at the Boilerhouse and to establish the museum as an independent institution:-

“The Design Museum does not therefore exist to legitimate a specific notion of ‘good’ design or personal taste. Nor does it endorse a particular aesthetic. Its intellectual vitality depends on being inclusive rather than exclusive. As an independent body it is tied neither to the immediate preoccupations of the design profession nor to government policy.”314

Bayley later recalled a memorable dinner with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street at which she scolded him, "You must not call this a ‘museum", considering the term too dead a descriptor for the Conran Foundation’s new initiative. According to Bayley he was about to say, "But Prime Minister, we have considered all possible names and, notwithstanding the unfortunate antiquarian associations for so thrusting and relevant a subject, we feel 'museum' is best since it drags design into the arena of culture where we think it should be.” Bayley recalls that he never got to finish the sentence as Thatcher said, "Don't 'but' me, young man."315 The incident did not dissuade her from agreeing to open the Design Museum on 5 July, 1989.

313

Positioning paper, The Design Museum, February 1989, the Design Museum Archives, London.

314

Positioning paper, The Design Museum, February 1989, the Design Museum Archives London.

315

Stephen Bayley, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, The Independent, 17 September 2006. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/behindthe-scenes-at-the-museum-415998.html (Accessed 9.04.17).

Fig. 33: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the opening of the Design Museum, 5 July 1989

The invitation to the opening party of the Design Museum carried the headline; “Can a function follow form.” It took the form of an advertisement that explained that design and advertising were connected through mass-market consumption; “Like design, advertising is involved with the mass-market, but like the Design Museum, this advertisement is unique.” heralding a new type of museum and visitor experience.316

The first exhibition, Commerce and Culture: From Pre-Industrial Art to Post-Industrial Value, set the agenda for the new Design Museum. In a foreword to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Design Museum Director Stephen Bayley asserted that commerce and culture were not separate entities but were all one, stating:-

316

Invitation to the opening of the Design Museum, 5 July 1989, the Design Museum Archives, London.

“Our modern muses are commerce, industry and technology, and we’re trying to make a home for them…Commerce and culture are all part of the same thing. The only difference between a museum and a department store is that in one of them, the goods are for sale.”317

The exhibition included full-scale reconstructions of the entrances to an American shopping mall, a Corinthian-style column from the Earls Court Sainsbury Homebase store together with Brucciani’s gallery of casts from the V&A. Now that they were free from the institutional shackles of the V&A, the exhibitions at the new Design Museum were able to depart from what was presented at the earlier Boilerhouse and could now more explicitly embrace commerce.

Fig 34: Display panel in the opening exhibition, Commerce and Culture at the Design Museum, 1989

Through its temporary exhibitions programme, permanent collection and learning programme, the new Design Museum focused attention on the cultural value of design and began to develop an audience for the subject. The earlier Boilerhouse Project at the V&A and the Design Museum at Butler’s Wharf offered independent spaces in which to think seriously about design and to communicate its value in the broadest cultural sense.

317

Stephen Bayley, Commerce and Culture: From Pre-Industrial Art to Post-Industrial Value, London: Design Museum, 1989.