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Deyan Sudjic on the Design Museum
As the institution reopens in a new home, its director shares his aspirations for the revamped space
I was hired by the Design Museum ten years ago with a brief to expand the museum. It had outgrown its home in Shad Thames and we wanted to at least double the number of its 250,000 annual visitors. When I arrived as director, there were already conversations going on with Tate Modern about acquiring some land behind the Turbine Hall, but it would have been an expensive option and the four million people visiting the Tate wouldn't necessarily have come to see us as well.
We talked to the V&A – where the Design Museum was established by Sir Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley as the Boilerhouse Project in 1983 – but in the end, we felt the available site was slightly too small and we would also have lost a sense of independence and identity. We considered Manchester, and also looked at sites in King's Cross and next to City Hall.
Finally, we got a call from the chief planner at Kensington and Chelsea council: Chelsfield, a property developer, wanted to build apartments on the land where the former Commonwealth Institute stood, on the edge of Holland Park. The council insisted that if the developer were to be given the go-ahead, it would have to find a cultural user to bring the exhibition space back to life.
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It took a while to strike a deal, but it has worked out well for us: we have a 300-year lease on a rent-free building into which Chelsfield put £20m towards the cost of fixing and, in exchange, they got to build three blocks of high-end apartments designed by OMA. The site is far more accessible than our old home in Shad Thames and there is a sense of history here, too. Biba opened its first shop down the road and Royal Academicians built studios nearby in the 19th century.
Inside the design museum. Photo credit: Gareth Gardner
My vision for the Design Museum is simple. I always had in mind a National Theatre with three stages: a grand-scale thrust stage, an experimental box and a traditional proscenium. So we have three different exhibition spaces – one where you can put on a show that will sell lots of tickets, another that can be more challenging and adventurous and a third that houses a free, permanent display.
The permanent display, Designer Maker User, features around 1,000 objects that will be changed over time. The idea is that, within five to seven years, we'll have a completely new display – we have a very large 3D printer, for example, that I imagine in two years' time might be obsolete and will make way for the latest technology.
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We need this space for many reasons. Moving here feels like a very optimistic thing to have done against a darkening climate both at home and internationally. We are not overtly political, but it's time for institutions such as ours to promote the value of openness and enquiry that they believe in. Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World (which runs until 23 April 2017), for example, includes the Pan-European Living Room, an installation furnished with pieces from each of the 28 EU member states.
Fear and Love will be followed by an exploration of California in the post-Charles Eames period, the dominance of Silicon Valley and the collision between hippie modernism and huge financial success. After Beazley Designs of the Year, which runs until 19 February 2017, there will be a show called Imagining Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda and Revolution that looks at the way Stalin used design to glorify himself.
We are also planning a free exhibition in January with the Helen Hamlyn Trust, called New Old. Thirty years ago, when Hamlyn started the trust to explore ageing issues, she did a project with the Boilerhouse and now she's doing a follow-up here. Ageing has, of course, changed so much since then; the exhibition will investigate what it means to be part of a growing ageing population at a time when Celine can use 80-year-old Joan Didion as the public face of the brand.
We are hoping the footfall will rise to 650,000, of which we think 300,000 will buy tickets. We are optimistic – if you're a designer you have to be optimistic, if only because you are always hoping things might be different.
DEYAN SUDJIC OBE is director of the Design Museum in London. He studied architecture at Edinburgh University and was the founding editor of Blueprint magazine. His most recent book, The Language of Cities (Penguin), was published this year; designmuseum.org
