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24.01.2012 / Museums / 0 Comments
Conran launches transformation of Commonwealth Institute
Sir Terence Conran, the 80-year-old founder of the Design Museum, has launched designs for the new museum that will open in the former Commonwealth Institute building in 2014.
Work begins in April to transform the 1962 Grade II* building whose design has itself been a paradigm for architects. The new museum will sit within an £80m mixed commercial/civic development, and will itself cost £45m of which, director Deyan Sujic said, 70% had been raised.
The Design Museum was initially set in the "grim, grotty, dirty" boiler house space at the Victoria & Albert Museum where 25 exhibitions were mounted in five years, Conran said - but, he revealed, they were obliged to leave after pressure on the V&A director, Sir Roy Strong, from his curatorial staff. "He found it difficult to deal with his curators who collectively disliked what we were doing in the Boilerhouse" he said. "But V&A is a museum of the decorative arts, the Design Museum is a museum of the industrial arts", and opened the present building at Shad Thames in 1988, which, Conran said, they had now outgrown.
The new museum can have the effect, in a period of downturn, of bringing a new energy to the country, he said. "We are thought in the rest of the world to be the most creative, yet we don't seem to echo this in this country" he said.
The new Design Museum is being designed by John Pawson and as well as space for temporary exhibitions will have displays for its permanent collection s, which have not had the opportunity at Shad Thames. There is to be café and restaurant, a shop, and a library paid for by the Sackler Foundation. The Conran Foundation itself has given £17m. The award winning architecture of the building, which has lain empty for ten years, with its undulating copper roof is to be preserved.
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