Kensington High Street

multifaceted journey; “this exhibition challenges convention by combining a retail design approach with art, culture and fashion cues to broaden the audience appeal.”369

Fig. 46: Christian Louboutin at the Design Museum, 2012. Curated by Donna Loveday. Exhibition and graphic design: Household.

Crucially, these exhibitions included elements that featured the designer’s process and professional context as integral dimensions, for example, re-staging the designer’s studio in Christian Louboutin and including footage of seminal runway shows in Hussein Chalayan: From fashion and back. These aspects of curatorial practice will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4 with a focus on the 2013 exhibition, Hello, My Name is Paul Smith.

3.8 The Development of the New Design Museum on Kensington High Street

In November 2016, London’s Design Museum moved from its former location at Shad Thames in south east London to reopen at the former Commonwealth Institute, on Kensington High Street. The move was first

369

The Christian Louboutin Retrospective Exhibition, Public document, DBA submission 2013: 2.

proposed some years before, under the directorship of Alice Rawsthorn, when other contenders for a site were considered such as the planned extension for the Tate by Herzog and De Meuron.

In 2012 Design Museum Director, Deyan Sudjic, drafted a positioning paper that proposed a concept for the new museum. In an internal document, From the City to the Spoon, Sudjic took the view promoted by Italian architect Ernesto Rogers who believed that close examination of an industrial object reveals so much about the context in which it was produced.370 Interviewed shortly after taking up his role as Director in 2006, Sudjic stated:-

“I have always been struck by this line from Ernesto Rogers, who said in a provocative essay that if you explore a spoon carefully enough, you can intuit the kind of city that would be built by the intelligence that made it.”371

Sudjic’s positioning paper sets out a typical day in the life of the new museum; Thursday 3 August 2012. The day starts at 8am when the museum installation team arrive to put the final touches to a new exhibition, The Meaning of Jewellery. At 10am the museum opens to the public and a school party of twenty-five makes their way to the education suite. At 12 noon a group of MA students from Kingston University arrive for a seminar on curating for children. At 6.30pm John Pawson and Calvin Klein arrive to debate the relationship between architecture and fashion in front of an invited audience. The day ends at 8pm when the international board of Herman Miller arrive for a dinner in the event space after a tour of the permanent collection by the director.372

The concept document gives a sense of past achievements but also articulates the future for an expanded Design Museum and suggests an

370 Ernesto Rogers cited in ‘Pedro Silman: The Blog’. Available at: http://www.pedrosilmon.com/blog/2017/03/architecture-richard-rogers-on-alvar-aalto/ (Accessed 20.06.17). Peter Aspden, ‘Blueprint for a new Design Museum’, Financial Times, 6 September

371 2006. Available at: https://ft.com/content (Accessed 20.06.17).

Deyan Sudjic, Concept Document for a new Design Museum, 2012, Personal Archive.

372

expanded programme of activity. The paper was the starting point for museum trustees, staff and, at a later date, the architectural team to be able to plan for a new Design Museum, a process that started in 2010.

In 2010 a partnership formed by Chelsfield and the Ilchester Estate was granted planning permission by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to redevelop the west Kensington site. Permission was given for the construction of three residential buildings and the refurbishment of the Grade II* listed building located at the centre of the site. Following the terms of a Section 106 agreement that formed part of the planning permission, the Design Museum was granted a 175-year lease of the listed building at a peppercorn rent. The complex renovation of the museum saw OMA led by Reinier de Graaf, Allies and Morrison, Arup and John Pawson work together to bring the former Commonwealth Institute building, a landmark of post-war British architecture, back into use.

Designed by John Pawson and OMA, two basement levels were excavated below the footprint of the original 1960s Grade II listed building, increasing its floor plan from 6,000 square metres to 10,000 square metres. Using radical engineering techniques, the original concrete floors were removed, a process that entailed propping the roof on a temporary steel structure twenty metres above the ground. The original façade was replaced with a double glazed skin, significantly improving insulation standards and allowing daylight into the interior. The new exterior was meticulously detailed to resemble the original blue skin of the building, with matching mullions and a fritted pattern of printed dots. A new public plaza complete with fountains was installed at the entrance to the museum within a landscape designed by West 8.373

The renovated building, with its distinctive copper-covered, hyperbolic paraboloid roof, offered three times more space in which to present larger scale exhibitions, a wider range of learning activities and events, and the opportunity to display the museum’s collection on the top floor. A carefully

373 Tom Wilson, The Story of the Design Museum, London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2016: 93. 226

planned rebranding took the institution’s name from “Design Museum” to “the Design Museum - the world's leading museum devoted to contemporary design in every form from architecture and fashion to graphics, product and industrial design.”374

In published reflections on the making of a new museum, John Pawson explains that an attitude has to be at the heart of a museum of design:-

“The interior architecture must offer the means to circulate, to eat, to buy, to work, to learn and to store but, above all else, it must embody a view of how to place and experience objects in space - objects of diverse scales and typologies, requiring a range of climatic and lighting conditions.”375

On 24 November 2016, the Design Museum opened in its new home on Kensington High Street, west London. The project was the culmination of a five-year construction process and investment of £83 million.376 For the museum’s founder, Terence Conran, moving the Design Museum to Kensington to the former Commonwealth Institute building, a listed building originally designed by Sir Robert Matthew in the 1960s, was overwhelmingly the most important and exciting achievement of his career:-

“This is our time and this is our big moment. It has allowed all our dreams and ambitions for the museum to come true, creating a world-class space with the size and scope for the serious promotion and celebration of design and architecture in this country.”377

During the museum’s development, a series of meetings were convened with senior staff to debate and discuss the “tone of voice" for the new

374

Jessica Mairs, ‘London’s new Design Museum by John Pawson and OMA unveiled’, Dezeen, 17 November 2016. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/11/17/designmuseum-opens-architecture-news-john-pawson-oma-kensington-london-uk/ (Accessed 4.03.18).

375 Tom Wilson, The Story of the Design Museum, London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2016: 93.

376

’The Design Museum opens in Kensington’, Media release, 24 November 2016, the Design Museum archives, London.

377

Sir Terence Conran, Foreword to The Story of the Design Museum, London: Phaidon, 2016: 7.

museum. The resulting discussions formed the focus of an internal document, Design Museum Vision, Mission, Values & Strategic Objectives. The paper stated the new vision of the museum to be:-

“We want everyone to understand the value of design.”

with a mission “to create the most inspiring, forward-looking, exciting and engaging design museum in the world.”378 The mission was accompanied by four core values - Welcoming, Collaborative, Enterprising and Provocative. The visitor, and the end user for design, was now firmly placed at the heart of the museum’s planning and would be at the core of the new museum and all its facilities. As Sudjic later wrote:-

“The Design Museum sees itself as trying to offer some perspective on this rapidly changing landscape. It looks forward, more than to the past. It sees contemporary design and architecture as part of a wider cultural landscape, rather than as the exclusive preserve of the specialist or the professional. Our role is to explore what an object means to the people who use it and make it, as well as what it does and how it is made.”379

378

Design Museum Vision, Mission, Values & Strategic Objectives, April 2012 - November 2014, Design Museum Archive.

‘Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic: ‘Objects real a lot about the way we live, who

379 we are, what we value’, The Guardian, 18 February 2017.