After ten years of waiting, the Design Museum reopens in London at a new venue. On show are not only objects, but also evolutionary processes and contemporary issues.
The New Design Museum in London opens at its new home on High Street Kensington. From 24 November, the public will be able to visit the museum, whose floor space has been tripled compared to the previous version and which aims to be "the cathedral of design and architecture", as its founder, designer Terence Conran, born in 1931, has stated. An ambitious goal, but not an impossible one, given that it is already one of the most followed museums on Twitter.
Founded in 1982, but becoming fully independent in 1989 when a permanent and official home was found, the Design Museum has come a long way: from its premises in a former banana warehouse at Shad Thames, in south-west London, to the new one in the very heart of the British capital, in a 1960s modernist building whose roof has been preserved thanks to a lengthy restoration process. OMA, Allies and Morrison and Arup, three major architectural practices, handled the exterior, while architect John Pawson designed the interior, taking on a museum project for the first time.
A minimalist atrium with pale oak wooden floors welcomes visitors on the ground floor, opening up views across the other two levels and the original parabolic roof structure. Defined as a low carbon building — that is, a building with low carbon consumption and production — the New Design Museum boasts a sophisticated system that allows lighting to be monitored and adjusted according to the number of people moving through the exhibition spaces, as well as controlling heating and ventilation, thereby reducing their use.
On the top floor is the permanent exhibition, free to enter for the first time: a thousand objects which, as Deyan Sudjic, the museum's director, explains, are not displayed chronologically but according to the issues they address. Welcoming visitors is a six-metre-wide wall of objects selected by the public through an online platform, the Crowdsourced wall. The aim is to reflect on what design is and on its importance in everyday life, from the perspective of the designer — that is, the person who creates the object — and of the end user. Objects range from a prototype of a new London Underground train to the Sony Walkman, from a Kalashnikov model to the Valentine typewriter by Olivetti.
The first temporary exhibition, located on the ground floor, is a mirror of our times. 11 designers explore a variety of issues that inspire fear and love at the same time. And it is in this section that sustainability, too, is addressed. Among the installations is Fibre market by Dutch product designer Christien Meindertsma, which explores the potential of textile recycling, in particular of wool, starting from a critique of the fast fashion model — that is, a form of fashion in which production takes place as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to ride the wave of the latest trends. Working with a thousand discarded wool jumpers and experimenting with a first generation of machines capable of separating garments by colour and fabric, the designer transforms the fibres into a colourful presence within the exhibition.
Arquitectura Expandida is a Colombian collective of activist architects, operating primarily in the community of Ciudad Bolívar, one of the poorest and most violent districts of the capital Bogotá, creating structures for the most disadvantaged people. The installation consists of a reproduction of a school, Potocinema, built with local materials — bamboo and polycarbonate sheets. At this centre, young people are taught how to make videos, some of which are screened inside the London installation, to help steer them away from delinquency and gangs.
Wuyong or Useless is a project by Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke, who believes in a strong relationship between clothing and the rural traditions of her homeland, and in abandoning consumerism and fast fashion. After ten years in the fashion world, Ma Ke founded her own social enterprise that works with women from mountainous areas of south-west China, focusing on traditional methods of clothing production. The installation is composed of ten garments, including Mother Earth, a dress resting on a bed of soil.
For the ninth consecutive year, Designers in residence returns — the programme that gives space to emerging designers, whose work is displayed on the museum's second floor. This year four have been selected, among them Italian designer Andrea De Chirico, who presents Superlocal, a project exploring the potential of local production in search of sustainable solutions that allow working in close contact with the community. On display are several hairdryer models made in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, whose components were all produced within a 4.5-kilometre production area, as well as some stool models, also produced within a few kilometres in west London.