When looking for a design fix in London, the first place we usually turn to is the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the venerable, 165-year-old institution whose holdings date back some two millennia. But the British capital is also home to the simply, and rather directly, named Design Museum, which aesthetic arbiter Terence Conran founded in 1989 with a specific focus on contemporary creations.
Until this summer, that relatively scrappy museum was housed in, of all things, a former banana warehouse on the south bank of the Thames. But today, it’s opening a highly anticipated new headquarters in the heart of London—not far, in fact, from the V&A, on the edge of Kensington’s Holland Park. Occupying an iconic mid-20th-century structure that’s been re-mastered by British architectural designer John Pawson, the new museum has three times the gallery space as the old one, allowing the institution to put its permanent collection on view—free of charge—for the very first time.
Known for his elegantly pared-back interiors, furnishings, and buildings—including hotelier Ian Schrager’s New York penthouse and the forthcoming W Jaffa hotel in Tel Aviv—Pawson has given the building, which opened in the 1960s as the Commonwealth Institute, decidedly new life. He’s removed the cinderblocks behind two of the site's signature blue-glass exterior walls, letting light flood into its central hall—a soaring, 50-foot-tall space capped by an undulating curved roof, which has been likened to that of a nun’s veil. A monumental set of stairs spirals up through the hall, connecting the ground floor with a wide mezzanine and then the permanent-collection galleries above that, where museumgoers will find such varied objects as a Sony Walkman, an AK47 rifle, and a full-size replica of the new scheme for London’s Underground trains. Some of the staircase’s lower steps are big enough to serve as benches, as if in an ancient Greek stadium or amphitheater (Pawson, in fact, refers to the massive room as “the arena”). The idea is to beckon people to come in, sit down, and consider views of the impressive, and impressively serene, space, which Pawson has finished in a typically limited palette of European oak, white plaster, pale terrazzo and polished concrete.
Beyond the 1,000 works on view in the exhibition dedicated to the permanent collection, the museum has reopened with two temporary shows: one devoted to the winners of its annual Designs of the Year competition, the other consisting of installations by 11 architects and designers responding to the theme “Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World,” on display in a ground-floor gallery and in a subterranean level that was excavated as part of the redevelopment. That basement shares space with a theater, while the main floor has a café. Above, there’s a restaurant overseen by a changing cast of culinary characters, the first of whom will be British author and chef Rowley Leigh.
Early reviews of the building’s redesign have been enthusiastic, to say the least.
“I showed around the woman who’s the VP of Estée Lauder here in London,” Pawson recently recalled of one of the preview tours he led. “She had her head down when she came in, and when she looked up, she just said ‘F--k-wow!’" How’s that for a minimalist endorsement?
.jpg)
.jpg)
