Thirty years ago in London, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher ventured south of the river to a converted banana-ripening warehouse in the city’s docklands where, as if to emphasise its Britishness, fish and chips were being served in the pink sheets of this newspaper. Thatcher was at Shad Thames to open the Design Museum, an ambitious new project spearheaded by Habitat founder Terence Conran and journalist and author Stephen Bayley, which aimed to promote contemporary design in Britain. In her speech, she applauded the museum’s private sponsors, but chided Conran for not having “quite enough British things” on show. Famously, she got stuck in the lift on the way up to the exhibition floor, and was instructed by Conran to jump down to the floor a foot below. “Terence always delights in pointing out it was a German-made lift,” says Deyan Sudjic, now co-director of the museum, with a faint grin, when we meet at his office in the Kensington building to which the museum has since moved. Sudjic and his co-director Alice Black are marking the museum’s 30th anniversary with an online exhibition of logos created for the occasion by artists and designers including Paul Smith, Margaret Calvert and Quentin Blake. An archival display, Made in 1989 — Celebrating 30 years of the Design Museum, which looked back at the museum’s history through objects and ephemera, including early photographs of the banana warehouse and a set of Carter Wong-designed posters, recently closed. Technology has profoundly altered how we live in the years since the museum opened, and one designer has consistently been at the forefront of this digital revolution: Jony Ive. The Design Museum was an early champion of the Chingford-born designer, showing his prototype of a mobile phone in 1990, two years before Steve Jobs hired him to work for Apple. In 2003, having designed the translucent iMac and the breakthrough iPod, Ive was named the museum’s inaugural Designer of the Year, although his iPhone did not win Design of the Year in 2008, a “howling error”, Sudjic admitted at the time. Logo designed by Alva Skog to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary Another radically minded figure to leave their mark on the museum was the architect Zaha Hadid, whom Sudjic first encountered in 1994 when she won a competition to design the new opera house in Cardiff. In 2007, a year after Sudjic became director of the museum, he gave Hadid her first solo exhibition in Britain. “People always say, ‘How can you show architecture in a museum, because you can never actually show the building?’” Sudjic says, “but Zaha was an incredible draftsperson. It was full of her drawings, the painting she did, as well as the objects and artefacts.” It’s high time that the British government recognised the jewel that it has here in London Alice Black Hadid, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2016, was instrumental in the museum’s £83m move to west London. Her architecture practice bought the Shad Thames building in 2013 for a reported £10m, which went towards the construction of a new museum. She was, Sudjic recalls, “extraordinarily loyal. Once she got to trust people, she really valued friendship.” Other early exhibitions to have captured the public’s imagination include the Power of Erotic Design (1997), which was less about sex and more about “conveying that design is not only about utility”, Sudjic says, and the first ever exhibition devoted to the master of stiletto shoes, Manolo Blahnik, in 2003. Although such shows were crowd-pleasing, the policy caused a rift between then director Alice Rawsthorn and the museum’s trustees. In 2004, James Dyson resigned as chairman in protest over what he perceived as the museum’s pursuit of style over substance. The final straw? A show on the 1950s society florist Constance Spry. Contrary to fears, however, Dyson’s protest did not spark a mass exodus and visitor numbers grew by 20 per cent in the first three years of Rawsthorn’s directorship. But, after just five years in the job, she left in 2006. Logo designed by Quentin Jones Sudjic’s first assignment at the helm was to find a bigger home. In 2006, when commerce was booming, that seemed like a straightforward task. But by 2010, “the stock market had vanished, it was quite sobering,” he recalls. Before settling on the former Commonwealth Institute pavilion on Kensington High Street in west London in 2008, trustees toyed with a number of options, including buying the site behind the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “We eventually realised that, though it would be nice to be next door to the Tate, it would be like being in a rowing boat attached to an aircraft,” Sudjic says. A return to the Victoria and Albert Museum (where an early prototype of the Design Museum began) or a move to Manchester were politely declined. Logo designed by Anthony Burrill From 2008, Alice Black led the redevelopment project; she was promoted from deputy to co-director in 2016. Funding chiefly came from the Conran Foundation and other private firms, including £20m from Chelsfield, the property developer that owned the site. The arch-minimalist architect John Pawson was hired to transform the interior of the abandoned pavilion, while the Dutch architecture practice OMA restored the shell. The end result drew mixed reactions: critics dubbed the new museum an “exceptional achievement” but also “boxy” and “clumsy”. Fear and Love was the first show in the Kensington space, a nod to the duality embodied in objects. “Design is a force for good, but it can also be used in a negative way,” Black explains. “We have an AK-47 in our permanent collection . . . It is, unfortunately, a piece of good design in that it’s efficient, it’s cheap, it’s reliable. But it’s put to terrible uses.” Recommended Design Fear and Love, Design Museum, London — ‘Big questions’ Ethical sponsorship has been a hot topic across the museum sector and the Design Museum has not gone unscathed. Last August it came under fire for hosting a private event for Leonardo, an Italian arms company: artists and designers including Shepard Fairey and Peter Kennard removed some 40 works from an exhibition of political graphic design that was running at the time. Black says the museum’s policies are in line with those of other institutions. Would the directors consider hosting an arms trade event in the future? “We have to review all funding opportunities to see whether they allow us to carry out our charitable objectives,” she says. The museum receives just two per cent of its £9m budget from the government. The rest is generated from ticket sales, touring exhibitions and events. “We look like we are a well-funded national museum. But we’re not,” Sudjic says. Black says they will continue to lobby for more public funding, despite the fact that state support for UK museums is shrinking overall. “It’s high time the British government recognised the jewel that it has here in London,” she says emphatically. The figures appear to support that: the museum is on track to receive 1.8m visitors since opening in Kensington (or 600,000 a year on average), although that number pales in comparison with Tate, which had nearly 5.9m visitors in 2018 alone. Recommended FT Magazine Smart move: London Design Museum’s new home Brexit is a topic that strikes close to home. Black, a French national, recently received settled status, and many of the museum’s employees are European citizens. In 2018 they won European Museum of the year. Some of the foreshock of Brexit was felt while preparing for the popular Stanley Kubrick show at the end of March, when the UK was originally due to leave the EU. With half the material coming from Spain, “we were looking at alternative transport arrangements,” Sudjic says. Black chimes in: “The climate of uncertainty is very difficult. Everyone is wondering what is going to happen, so it’s harder to take risks.” In November, the museum lobbied parliament to make the case for British design in the face of Brexit. Their message? Design powers our economy and society, so do not neglect it in schools, museums and the commercial world. The directors are developing “Future observatory”, a programme examining how design can tackle urgent issues such as ageing, new technologies and clean growth. “In all of these, there is a design potential,” Black says. “We want to rise above the Brexit debate and look at what we can do for the future.”
Thirty years ago in London, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher ventured south of the river to a converted banana-ripening warehouse in the city’s docklands where, as if to emphasise its Britishness, fish and chips were being served in the pink sheets of this newspaper. Thatcher was at Shad Thames to open the Design Museum, an ambitious new project spearheaded by Habitat founder Terence Conran and journalist and author Stephen Bayley, which aimed to promote contemporary design in Britain. In her speech, she applauded the museum’s private sponsors, but chided Conran for not having “quite enough British things” on show. Famously, she got stuck in the lift on the way up to the exhibition floor, and was instructed by Conran to jump down to the floor a foot below. “Terence always delights in pointing out it was a German-made lift,” says Deyan Sudjic, now co-director of the museum, with a faint grin, when we meet at his office in the Kensington building to which the museum has since moved. Sudjic and his co-director Alice Black are marking the museum’s 30th anniversary with an online exhibition of logos created for the occasion by artists and designers including Paul Smith, Margaret Calvert and Quentin Blake. An archival display, Made in 1989 — Celebrating 30 years of the Design Museum, which looked back at the museum’s history through objects and ephemera, including early photographs of the banana warehouse and a set of Carter Wong-designed posters, recently closed. Technology has profoundly altered how we live in the years since the museum opened, and one designer has consistently been at the forefront of this digital revolution: Jony Ive. The Design Museum was an early champion of the Chingford-born designer, showing his prototype of a mobile phone in 1990, two years before Steve Jobs hired him to work for Apple. In 2003, having designed the translucent iMac and the breakthrough iPod, Ive was named the museum’s inaugural Designer of the Year, although his iPhone did not win Design of the Year in 2008, a “howling error”, Sudjic admitted at the time. Logo designed by Alva Skog to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary Another radically minded figure to leave their mark on the museum was the architect Zaha Hadid, whom Sudjic first encountered in 1994 when she won a competition to design the new opera house in Cardiff. In 2007, a year after Sudjic became director of the museum, he gave Hadid her first solo exhibition in Britain. “People always say, ‘How can you show architecture in a museum, because you can never actually show the building?’” Sudjic says, “but Zaha was an incredible draftsperson. It was full of her drawings, the painting she did, as well as the objects and artefacts.” It’s high time that the British government recognised the jewel that it has here in London Alice Black Hadid, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2016, was instrumental in the museum’s £83m move to west London. Her architecture practice bought the Shad Thames building in 2013 for a reported £10m, which went towards the construction of a new museum. She was, Sudjic recalls, “extraordinarily loyal. Once she got to trust people, she really valued friendship.” Other early exhibitions to have captured the public’s imagination include the Power of Erotic Design (1997), which was less about sex and more about “conveying that design is not only about utility”, Sudjic says, and the first ever exhibition devoted to the master of stiletto shoes, Manolo Blahnik, in 2003. Although such shows were crowd-pleasing, the policy caused a rift between then director Alice Rawsthorn and the museum’s trustees. In 2004, James Dyson resigned as chairman in protest over what he perceived as the museum’s pursuit of style over substance. The final straw? A show on the 1950s society florist Constance Spry. Contrary to fears, however, Dyson’s protest did not spark a mass exodus and visitor numbers grew by 20 per cent in the first three years of Rawsthorn’s directorship. But, after just five years in the job, she left in 2006. Logo designed by Quentin Jones Sudjic’s first assignment at the helm was to find a bigger home. In 2006, when commerce was booming, that seemed like a straightforward task. But by 2010, “the stock market had vanished, it was quite sobering,” he recalls. Before settling on the former Commonwealth Institute pavilion on Kensington High Street in west London in 2008, trustees toyed with a number of options, including buying the site behind the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “We eventually realised that, though it would be nice to be next door to the Tate, it would be like being in a rowing boat attached to an aircraft,” Sudjic says. A return to the Victoria and Albert Museum (where an early prototype of the Design Museum began) or a move to Manchester were politely declined. Logo designed by Anthony Burrill From 2008, Alice Black led the redevelopment project; she was promoted from deputy to co-director in 2016. Funding chiefly came from the Conran Foundation and other private firms, including £20m from Chelsfield, the property developer that owned the site. The arch-minimalist architect John Pawson was hired to transform the interior of the abandoned pavilion, while the Dutch architecture practice OMA restored the shell. The end result drew mixed reactions: critics dubbed the new museum an “exceptional achievement” but also “boxy” and “clumsy”. Fear and Love was the first show in the Kensington space, a nod to the duality embodied in objects. “Design is a force for good, but it can also be used in a negative way,” Black explains. “We have an AK-47 in our permanent collection . . . It is, unfortunately, a piece of good design in that it’s efficient, it’s cheap, it’s reliable. But it’s put to terrible uses.” Recommended Design Fear and Love, Design Museum, London — ‘Big questions’ Ethical sponsorship has been a hot topic across the museum sector and the Design Museum has not gone unscathed. Last August it came under fire for hosting a private event for Leonardo, an Italian arms company: artists and designers including Shepard Fairey and Peter Kennard removed some 40 works from an exhibition of political graphic design that was running at the time. Black says the museum’s policies are in line with those of other institutions. Would the directors consider hosting an arms trade event in the future? “We have to review all funding opportunities to see whether they allow us to carry out our charitable objectives,” she says. The museum receives just two per cent of its £9m budget from the government. The rest is generated from ticket sales, touring exhibitions and events. “We look like we are a well-funded national museum. But we’re not,” Sudjic says. Black says they will continue to lobby for more public funding, despite the fact that state support for UK museums is shrinking overall. “It’s high time the British government recognised the jewel that it has here in London,” she says emphatically. The figures appear to support that: the museum is on track to receive 1.8m visitors since opening in Kensington (or 600,000 a year on average), although that number pales in comparison with Tate, which had nearly 5.9m visitors in 2018 alone. Recommended FT Magazine Smart move: London Design Museum’s new home Brexit is a topic that strikes close to home. Black, a French national, recently received settled status, and many of the museum’s employees are European citizens. In 2018 they won European Museum of the year. Some of the foreshock of Brexit was felt while preparing for the popular Stanley Kubrick show at the end of March, when the UK was originally due to leave the EU. With half the material coming from Spain, “we were looking at alternative transport arrangements,” Sudjic says. Black chimes in: “The climate of uncertainty is very difficult. Everyone is wondering what is going to happen, so it’s harder to take risks.” In November, the museum lobbied parliament to make the case for British design in the face of Brexit. Their message? Design powers our economy and society, so do not neglect it in schools, museums and the commercial world. The directors are developing “Future observatory”, a programme examining how design can tackle urgent issues such as ageing, new technologies and clean growth. “In all of these, there is a design potential,” Black says. “We want to rise above the Brexit debate and look at what we can do for the future.”
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