Museums + Heritage says that after almost five years of restoration and refurbishment, the Grade II* Design Museum has been transformed into a modern multi-purpose space.
Museums + Heritage writes:
The first thing to appreciate when you make your way into the new Design Museum is its impressive atrium. The wide-open space not only lends the visitor a view of the three floors and a mezzanine of exhibition and learning space surrounding them but also the restored hyperbolic paraboloid roof that soars 25m over the museum.
This latter structure is part of the former Commonwealth Institute building, opened in 1962. And this is what is exceptional about the new Design Museum: the fact that it has taken what was, by all accounts, an iconic but decaying Grade II* London building and restored and refurbished it. In essence, this is a hugely successful regeneration project that has given the Design Museum three times more space than its previous home at Shad Thames as well as a building that is of great significance from a historical and design point of view.
The copper external roof, and its concrete interior cousin, are not the only elements that have been kept in accordance with Historic England and visitors can also see on the -1 floor opposite the new 200-seat Bakala Auditorium a Commonwealth Map, an original feature of the old building, a marble wall on a landing two floors up and elsewhere stained glass windows.
But that’s where the remnants of the past end and are absorbed into an altogether new oak-lined structure in the centre of the building created by designer John Pawson. On the ground floor there is a café, shop and a temporary exhibition space with the opening show Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World, which features 11 installations from some of the world’s most thought-provoking designers and architects working today. This is an exhibition that educates as well as visually enthrals (it’s like walking into a labyrinth) with exhibits such as Christien Meindertsma’s Fibre Market showing piles of wool taken from 1,000 jumpers that had been thrown in recycling bins and is a critique of today’s disposable consumption. It also features a commission by architecture practice OMA, that also worked on the restoration of the building’s exterior, entitled The Pan-European Living Room – a slick lounge furnished with objects designed in each of the 28 EU states.
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View interviews with key people on the project, including the founder Sir Terence Conran
