After a redesign of $102 million, London Design Museum opened its doors on 24th November. More elegant, this museum has a bold new home, the former Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington, which until 2002 served as a miniature World’s Fair, promoting trade and cultural exchange among Britain’s former colonies, and three powerful inaugural exhibitions. London Design Museum has now 108,000 square feet of space, three times as much as its previous.

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“We thought the time was right to grow the museum, to take it beyond the exclusively design-orientated visitors that we’d had, to really make design part of a wider conversation,” says Deyan Sudjic, the museum’s director. “So in some ways what Tate Modern did for contemporary art, we are hoping to do for contemporary design and architecture.”

John Pawson was the responsible architectural designer for the building’s newly reconfigured interiors, where the Design Museum’s galleries are arranged around a minimal oak- and marble-lined atrium. Pawson also created a standalone shop for the museum.

On the top floor, a vibrant, free, permanent display titled “Designer, User, Maker” employs around 1,000 objects from the collection to examine the life cycle of a design from conception through manufacture to the consumer.

“All the floor structure of the building is new, so there was an extraordinary temporary structure holding up this roof while the old structure was knocked out to create the new building,” added Chris Masson of Pawson’s studio. “It was quite a feat of engineering.”
With a renewed design, the museum is now ready to offer the best of the design world and make visitors say “That felt good, that looked good. I enjoyed going to this museum.”

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