London’s Design Museum recently reopened in an entirely new, very dramatic facility, courtesy of John Pawson, OMA, and Allies and Morrison. (Artinfo's Mark Beech recently reported on the building in depth.) I spoke with co-director Alice Black about her favorite object from the collection; upcoming shows focusing on Californian design and the Russian Revolution; and the institution’s roof, which she likens to “a gigantic manta ray floating above your head.” What were the main factors prompting your move from the old location into this newly renovated site in Kensington? A decade ago the trustees of the Design Museum decided it was time to expand. We did not have enough space to give the full flavor of what design is and our visitors were telling us that they wanted more: more collection on display, more activities for families, schoolchildren, adults and community, and bigger exhibitions. We started to look around London for possible sites, and in 2008, both the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the developers who had acquired the site where the former Commonwealth Institute stood, approached us to explore whether the museum might be interested in refurbishing the listed building on High Street Kensington. We fell in love with its spectacular roof, and the area. Kensington High Street has excellent travel connections – three tube stops nearby, High Street Kensington, Earls Court and Holland Park; an overground stop at Kensington Olympia and lots of buses going up and down the high street. For the museum, ease of access is a critical factor for success.Finally, there is so much to do in Kensington – Holland Park, which surrounds the museum , is a beautiful park with exceptional gardens; High Street Kensington is a lovely high street; Leighton House is less than 5 minute walk, and 10 minutes walk in the other direction is Kensington Palace. Visitors can make a complete day out of their visit to the Design Museum. Can you talk a bit, in a general sense, about the look and feel of the new facility? Even looking at pictures online, one gets the impression of real drama, with this swooping, vaulted ceiling. Our new building is a landmark from the 1960s. We retained its original spectacular roof, which is the key reason why this building is listed Grade II*. It soars up to 16m above the ground level, creating a single span arch – imagine a gigantic manta ray floating above your head! Concrete rafters span the sides of the central arch, creating a radiant fan effect. It is simply breathtaking. Underneath, John Pawson, our architectural designer, has designed a new interior, which frames the original building in beautiful and unexpected ways. As you walk around the central atrium, you discover changing perspectives on the building and its structure. It is a pure delight I believe one of the museum’s first acquisitions was a 1960s-era gas pump; fairly lo-fi, in technological terms. In recent years, how have you balanced an interest in the aesthetics of design with an obvious pressure to keep abreast of new advances in technology...and without overstocking the collection with, for lack of a better word, gadgetry? The Mobil petrol pump is indeed one of our earliest acquisitions, it featured in the first Boilerhouse Project exhibition [a precursor to the Design Museum, formerly housed in the V&A] in 1982. The Design Museum’s current collecting strategy is informed mainly by the museum’s mission to make everyone understand the value of design. We select objects for the quality of the story that they tell about design, and how significant designs have changed the way we live. In that context, we collect technology, without being exhaustive, and we show how the advances in technology have had an impact on our daily lives. From Bill Moggridge Grid Compass, the first laptop, to Jonathan Ive’s iMac, or our recent acquisition of ‘Human Organ on Chips.’ The latter is the winner of last year's Design of the Year award; it’s a microchip lined with human cells used to trial new drugs or cosmetics, and can better predict the reaction of the human body, than testing done in other, traditional ways. As a design museum, how is your stewardship of this institution different from that of a fine art museum? Do you find much overlap in audiences? Fine arts and sculpture are often left to speak for themselves. Conversely, design is inseparable from context. When we exhibit design, we need to convey the process behind it, including manufacturing processes, such as 3D printing; thinking processes, such as sketchbooks, paper models and tools; or reactive/political/social processes, such as the street as a source of fashion inspiration. The word design will conjure up different thoughts to different people. Indeed the definition of design has changed dramatically over the last thirty years in comparison with the fine arts. Back in the 1980s, the Boilerhouse Project was very much focussed on the relationship between design and industry. Today, design is appreciated as much for its ability to provoke debate as much as its function. Our current exhibition, “Fear and Love,” looks at how design can be a critical reflection on contemporary concerns. There is certainly an overlap in audiences for fine art and design institutions – people today are discerning cultural consumers. Audiences crave experiences – an encounter with a beautiful work of art with aesthetic qualities that will captivate them; a thought-provoking display about robotics and new manufacturing technologies. Our visitors want to be inspired, and also to learn more about the world they live in. I’m sure it’s frustrating to pick favorites, but at the moment, do you have a particular object in the collection that you are personally drawn to or inspired by? It is a challenge to single out an object… I would say at the moment my favorite is the motorway sign, designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Kinneir and Calvert took a radical approach to create a simple graphic system to rationalize road signs throughout Britain. Their detailed work resulted in a clear, consistent, simple design, that could be legible and understood at speed. Many countries went on to develop their signage, inspired by their approach. You can see a motorway sign at scale in our permanent display, Designer Maker User, on the top floor of the museum – it has such presence – it makes you realise how the world around us is in large parts designed. What can we look forward to in terms of exhibition programming at the space into 2017? Our next big exhibition, in 2017, will be on design in California: from Google, to Facebook, Airbnb, not to mention Apple, California has led a revolution in our daily lives – we want to explore this topic and lift the curtain on the reasons why such innovative designs emerged from this corner of the world. We will also have an exhibition on the Russian Revolution and how the ambitions and hopes for a new world order inspired a new bold architecture in the Soviet Union, as well as an exhibition which will explore the theme of color in collaboration with Hella Jongerius.
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