The Design Museum reopens in an ambitiously renovated site

By K.S.C.

THIS week the doors of the Design Museum in London will glide open to admit visitors after a six-month hiatus. The break was caused by relocation, the third in the museum’s history. Originally housed in a basement underneath the Victoria & Albert museum, affectionately known as the boiler house, it was given a space of its own in 1989: a converted banana warehouse in Shad Thames on the city’s South Bank. Its new home—a grade-II listed building which once housed the Commonwealth Institute—is grander still.

It has tripled in size, from 3,000 square metres to around 10,000, allowing for a permanent collection, a library, studios for its resident designers and two temporary exhibition spaces. This sprightly upward mobility reflects both the growth of the museum’s ambitions in the three decades since its creation by Sir Terence Conran, but also a greater demand and respect for good design by the wider public. Despite this rags-to-riches arc, the new museum is careful neither to appear too smug, nor gloss over more controversial topics, including Brexit, refugee housing and the ugly consequences of rampant consumer consumption.

The most striking feature of the original building, first designed in 1962 by RMJM architects, is the roof, a billowing, parabolic curve. It is central to the £83m redesign too. In a radical engineering intervention by OMA, Allies & Morrison and Arup, the roof was supported on stilts while the structure beneath it was levelled and then faithfully recreated. The interior—a somewhat Escherian symphony of blonde oak walls, open stairways and white marble recycled from the original building—was designed by John Pawson, the high priest of high-end minimalism. It slots inside the structure as neatly as an iPhone inside its packaging, with an open central atrium that allows visitors to admire the roof’s exposed underbelly from a series of intriguing angles as they move through the museum. The original building was short on natural light, and the new space has worked within these constraints. Daylight is husbanded in a few zones—the members’ room, restaurant and ground floor shop—elsewhere the space is bathed in a warm glow from lights recessed into everything from walls to banisters.

The permanent collection display, designed by Morag Myerscough, adds a lighter and more accessible touch. The “crowdsourced wall”, for example, contains collections of objects nominated by visitors (it currently boasts a pair of Levi’s, a scarlet Olivetti typewriter and some yellow washing-up gloves). Nearby, a colourful sign (pictured) that revolves to reveal the words “designer”, “maker” and “user” in turn, was surely created with Instagram in mind. Its look, in other words, manages to marry the hard-edged, challenging aesthetic favoured by the design cognoscenti, with the more user-friendly feel necessary if the museum is to attract visitors already spoilt for choice. Their goal for the first year is a relatively modest 500,000.

This is not to say what is on view lacks bite. One provocation, in a building that once celebrated the commonwealth, are various references (some subtle, others less so) to the politics of the Brexit vote. Take OMA’s display at the “Fear & Love: Reactions to a Complex World” exhibition. At first glance, the Dutch firm’s offering resembles a slightly garish room-set complete with bold floral wallpaper, striped blind and mid-century furniture. But each object comes from one of the 28 EU member states, while the blind is the firm’s EU barcode flag: the British slat lies discarded on the floor. Downstairs, in the annual “Beazley Designs of the Year display”, is “Better Shelter”, a tiny flat-pack home designed in partnership with Ikea to provide housing for those displaced by crises. Unlike tents, such as those recently removed from Calais, these are lockable, providing a measure of privacy and safety, and when they are no longer in use they can be collapsed and shipped elsewhere.

Other intractable problems find solutions through designed objects here too. A robotic surgeon may help those who, as the cost of healthcare in America has risen, have turned to YouTube videos to attempt self-administered surgery. The environmental cost of consumerism is a popular theme. Adidas teamed up with Pelay to create trainers with recycled ocean plastic; Ma Ke, a Chinese fashion designer, is displaying her project “Wuyong” (“Useless”), clothing intended to be the opposite of fast fashion. More pointed still is Christien Meindertsma’s “Fibre Market”, with woollen fibres from 1,000 discarded sweaters sorted into colour-coded piles. On the walls behind the real makeup of the clothes— 40% acrylic—is contrasted with the information from their labels—100% merino.

Still, the earnestness doesn’t overpower. Elsewhere there is robotic arm in a Perspex box that is programmed to playfully interact, puppy-like, with passing visitors, turning to someone else if they fail to sufficiently entertain it. And glass cups, contorted to maximise the surface tension of the liquid contained within them, allow astronauts to drink coffee in space. Although it contains an eclectic brew, the new Design Museum avoids the pitfalls of many of others of its kind—stultifying collections of chairs in chronological order—and provides instead a thoughtful and timely addition to London’s cultural map.