Original subtitles

[stirring music]

Narrator: Locked up and unloved,

the old Commonwealth Institute

in London's fashionable Kensington

faced an uncertain future.

Opened in 1962 as a permanent showcase

for the countries of the Commonwealth,

its unusual design proved costly to maintain.

So costly that in 2004, the building was closed.

By then, this landmark on Kensington High Street,

with its unusual roof,

had been listed Grade II#*.

English Heritage called it

the second most important modern building in London,

after the Royal Festival Hall.

Now, it has a new life,

as home of The Design Museum

with the exterior masterplan handled by OMA

and the interior crafted

by one of Britain's greatest minimalists,

John Pawson.

- You can never please everybody,

because of course there were people

who loved the Commonwealth Institute as it was

and so didn't want anything changed.

And then there are people who realise that...

that by saving it,

and...and retuning it for the Design Museum

was perhaps a good thing.

[stirring music continues]

Narrator: Perth, Western Australia, 2011.

The Queen is opening the Commonwealth

Heads of Government Meeting.

She has a particular passion for the Commonwealth,

the organisation that ties together 53 countries,

many of which were part of the British Empire

when she was crowned in 1953.

Five years after the Queen's coronation,

the old Imperial Institute

was renamed the Commonwealth Institute

and it commissioned a building

where Londoners could find out about life

in those far-off lands coloured pink in the school atlas,

that the Queen made it her mission to visit.

The London building was designed by

Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall and Partners

at the south end of Holland Park,

under a swooping paraboloid roof

made from 25 tonnes of copper donated by Northern Rhodesia.

The Queen opened it in 1962.

But there were problems, leaks being one of them.

As the memory of Empire faded

and the Commonwealth matured,

the Institute began to look old-fashioned.

And it was costing millions to maintain.

So, controversially, it was sold to developers,

with permission to use some of the land

for apartment blocks,

as long as the 1962 building was kept.

The scheme wasn't popular with some conservationists

but at least the Institute would survive.

With a new occupier, The Design Museum.

And, in the year that the Queen made her last trip Down Under,

the man who founded the Design Museum,

Sir Terence Conran,

gave £17.5 million of his own money

to realise a dream.

Terence Conran is burying a time capsule.

It's been a long road from the early days

in the basement of the V & A to this site,

right in the heart of London's Cultural Quarter.

And Conran hopes it will send a message.

- Really, the most important

thing for me

is that it should persuade government

of the importance of design.

And how important it is to put engineers

and entrepreneurs and designers together

to create new industries,

making things that the world wants.

Narrator: For many years, the Design Museum lived

on a wharf in the Thames,

a stone's throw from Tower Bridge.

A bit out of the way.

Terence Conran believed

that all this deserves a wider audience,

an audience that, in Kensington,

may already have visited the Science Museum, the V & A

and the Natural History Museum.

But moving to such a prestigious area,

and adapting a 1962 building, comes at a price.

£83 million.

The challenge has been given to a man known for minimalism,

John Pawson.

- Everybody always thinks of architecture

as being new buildings.

But actually, it's a lot more than that.

And I think as time goes on,

finding a new use or retuning great, um, existing buildings,

I think is probably one way to go.

It was an exhibition space,

but it was an exhibition space which of course

was to show the commonwealth countries' products.

But of course so they didn't need windows.

And of course the big difference for us is that, you know,

I want people to be able to easily orientate themselves

and know where the front door was

[laughs] after they've been in.

So we've got windows. It's an extraordinary space.

And to have it in the middle of Kensington

is...was extraordinary.

I mean, you'd never be able to build it today.

- Here in this parlour, we've got the most...

the greatest single concentration of museums

in the world. And how delighted we are...

Narrator: Today is a milestone

for writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic,

once the design and architecture critic for The Observer,

who took over as Director of the Design Museum in 2006.

It's taken a long time to get here.

A lot of people worked really, really hard.

But for me, it's particularly wonderful.

I used to come to this building as a child

when it was the most modern interior in London.

It was a utopian dream of what Britain might be.

And to bring it back to life for a new design museum

is particularly satisfying.

It was a monument to British engineering

and daring, one might say, architecture.

And we're going to bring it back to life sympathetically.

For a new use, of course.

This, to me,

is...really one of the most fantastic days

of my rather long life.

And...the next three years,

when we make this ambition

to be the very best design museum in the world.

Every city wants a design museum,

it seems these days.

But this is where creative Britain should lead.

Narrator: Fast forward four years,

and the old Commonwealth Institute building

is still a recognisable feature of Kensington.

Now cured of its 1960s leaks,

and covering an exhibition space

that speaks not of the history of Empire and Commonwealth,

but of design.

And that includes John Pawson's own design for the interior.

[smooth jazz music]

- It's trying to...

to have a certain calmness,

so that you...you sort of feel good when you walk in

and then...and things look good,

you know, when it's a bit calmer.

I mean, it's the sort of serenity, I suppose,

would be a word you'd be after.

[smooth jazz music continues]

We were able to, I suppose,

bring a certain domestic refinedness

to, you know, a big public space.

So it... I think when you walk in,

it has a calmness

and a certain, you know, friendliness.

And, you know, and you incorporate all those things.

I mean, one of the things I wanted to do was, you know,

when you walked in, you could orientate yourself

by seeing wherever you wanted to go.

You know, you could...you could...

and there was this incredible vertical sense of space.

You know, because you see the whole five floors

from certain vantage points.

Narrator: Pawson is in love with wood.

He's chosen oak for the atrium

and, as usual, paid great attention to detail.

The way the strips of wood meet,

how the wood interacts with other materials.

And he was well aware

that too much wood can overwhelm.

Pawson: I didn't want it to be, you know, like a humidor.

You know, I mean, it's...

so there's still a lot of white.

But I mean, the main... one of the main

things for me is that I tried to have the white out of reach.

I haven't succeeded everywhere, but you... So you'd... [laughs]

The paw marks aren't, um...

So that... I mean, that's one of the reasons for wood,

and also I was able to perforate the panels

so that they're acoustic as well,

which makes the... it more comfortable,

audibly more comfortable.

An architect works with, you know,

various things for building.

I mean, building blocks, material's probably

one of the most important, and light.

And then...and then the others like scale and proportion

and mass and things like that.

But material, yes, I mean,

my palette's never been very big. [chuckles]

It's just two or three different woods

and two or three different stones.

Narrator: And does the minimalist do justice

to the Commonwealth Institute of old?

Yes, says the Design Museum's Director.

- I remember coming to this building as a child.

It was a compulsory school visit.

And we thrilled at the sights of the diorama

that...convey the finer points of sheep shearing

in the case of Australia,

or the Inuit totem pole and the snowmobile from Canada,

and the Sri Lankans who, rather regrettably,

shot and stuffed a tiger for their display.

And like many utopian buildings,

the roof leaked furiously

and the insulation characteristics were terrible,

so as time went by, the commonwealth decided

they would rather spend their money elsewhere,

and left this building as a landmark.

A modern landmark, a modern ruin.

And again, when I was a journalist,

then at the Observer,

I found myself actually confronted with the glimmer

of the attempt by the then Secretary of State Tessa Jowell

to have the building delisted

so the commonwealth could flob off the land

as advantageously as possible.

And I am so glad that I actually said it must be saved,

because four years later,

when I was trying to find a new home for the Design Museum,

this seemed like a very positive option.

[smooth jazz music concludes]

Narrator: At 70, John Pawson,

born in Halifax, educated at Eton,

can reflect on a career

as one of Britain's most sensitive designers,

a man who reduced architecture to its minimalist form

and played with light, mass, rhythm, scale and proportion.

[uplifting orchestral music]

He started his practice in 1981

and attracted attention in the early 1990s

for taking a Victorian town house, his own home,

and replacing the interior with a homage to minimalism.

- My father was an architect [indistinct].

I mean, he...he was always, um...

had friendly architects that he was drawing up plans with

and so on. So home was...

..you know, the... There was that sort of feeling about it.

But yes, it's strange. I mean, I remember...

you know, odd things.

You know, odd spaces in Halifax

and things that you'd walk into

and you couldn't quite understand

why some places felt good and others didn't.

I was trying to explain

or trying to understand where something comes from

in your...DNA or your background,

or why you ended up being an architect,

why you ended up designing as you do.

So you... It's all instinctive.

But then you go back to... If people...

If you want to try and explain to people why...

you know, as my sisters say,

"Why you turned out so weird," you know?

Narrator: His work includes houses,

many of them in extraordinary settings...

..churches - this is the church of St Moritz in Augsburg

where Pawson re-organised the interior

in his trademark minimalist style.

A bridge,

ballet sets...

..even the interiors of yachts.

His is one of the few architects' practices

to have been asked to design and build an abbey.

When the monks from the Abbey of Our Lady in Bohemia

turned up at his London office,

he thought it was a practical joke

played by his staff.

It wasn't.

And since 2004, the Pawson team has been working on a chapel,

a guesthouse and outbuildings

at this important site in the Czech Republic.

It's all done, he says, "with simplicity."

He believes, "Life has a spiritual

"and a physical dimension

"and architecture must seamlessly hold both."

The sort of quote you might expect from a man

who, at 24, left Yorkshire for Japan

to become a Zen Buddhist monk.

I had a dream of becoming a Zen Buddhist monk

but, um, it didn't quite...

you know, I ended up teaching at university, though, so...

My mother's Methodist background

and, um... primitive Methodist that...

I think she always wanted me to be a missionary.

Um, she wasn't...expecting me to sort of go somewhere fancy,

you know? [chuckles]

She just wanted me to do it sort of modestly.

[siren wails distantly]

You know, you try to work at something

so that nothing is done really for effect,

or, you know, you...

I think everything has to have a reason,

you know, behind the design.

It's hard work, and you sort of, you know,

grind away at it and hopefully, you know, it works.

I've been lucky to be able to have done,

you know, such a mix of buildings.

I mean, to...you know, to do the churches

and the monasteries is, you know,

isn't open to every architect.

I mean, I've been incredibly lucky to do that.

And then you have the domestic houses

and the stuff.

I mean, designing things to go in those buildings.

It's not that I want... I want to control everything,

per se, but I...

it... these small things do affect the atmosphere,

and, you know, and the way you feel about places.

[birds tweeting]

[gentle music]

Narrator: Most architects look to those who went before them

for inspiration.

For John Pawson,

it was the German-American Mies van der Rohe,

one of the pioneers of modernist architecture,

who coined the expression 'less is more',

an idea given expression through designs

like the Farnsworth House near Chicago,

built just after the Second World War,

and rescued in 1972

by Arts Council Chairman Peter Palumbo.

- I did have a day there

which was absolutely amazing,

and Peter Palumbo had organised it.

And they had a housekeeper or a woman that looked after it,

and we arrived in the morning,

and you know,

she was very welcoming and quite talkative.

Very, very talkative.

And so I thought, "What on earth am I going to do?"

Because I just...you know, you just couldn't...

absorb the atmosphere, because of this sort of...

You know, she felt the need to not have any silence.

And so I said, I said to her,

"Oh, maybe we should all have a minute's silence

"in memory of Mies."

And what was brilliant is she took that on board

more seriously than I could have hoped.

And... [laughs]

So it took a, you know,

an hour to break the silence, which was great.

I would say there are no heroes, but, um...

But I'd say he's about as good as you...you can get,

I think, in architecture.

I mean, extraordinary.

I mean, the body of work

and the dedication and the talent.

I mean, huge, massive.

Massive.

That idea of pushing it to the ultimate,

but in a way that the craftsmanship and the...

and the atmosphere and the pleasure you get

from being... and the proportion.

Because that's what you never get from the photographs,

when you go to France or visit the...

The staircases are so wide and the...

and it's so deep, you know.

It's... No, it's quite a dream, really.

Narrator: Pawson's admiration

of Mies van der Rohe's minimal aesthetic

shines through in his work.

But small houses are one thing.

Museum galleries, quite another.

John Pawson has worked with exhibition spaces before.

In Berlin in 2016,

he transformed a Second World War

telecommunications bunker into an art museum.

By then, he had completed London's Design Museum interior.

His practice may not be very big,

but it's prolific.

He says he's not much of a sketcher,

relies on others in his practice for computer-aided design,

but does like making models.

And it was a model he brought with him

to the competition interview

to land the job at London's Design Museum.

When we were doing the competition,

um, I mean, it was quite stressful.

I mean, it was...it was an incredible field.

And so, you know, and...

Anyway, I remember it got down to sort of the short list

and Catherine and I,

she had kindly driven me with my model of the scheme.

And...and then...

And then there was another architect before me,

and he had a huge van with six assistants,

[laughs] who got out this huge...

and I thought, "Oh, [muted]" [laughs]

'Cause his was magnificent,

and I thought, "Oh..." You know.

So I... [laughs]

Anyway.

Interviewer: But you got it? - Yeah, I got it, which was...

Yeah, I was...yeah.

It was, um... It was quite a...

You know, it was quite an investment, emotionally.

[easy guitar music]

- I think that why we chose John

is that we have a powerful building with this roof.

We have a very active, vibrant campaign of exhibitions.

And we wanted an architect

who could gently bring the building back to life,

to dispel that sense of failure

without inserting their own ego into that.

And I think John has actually very beautifully created

a building inside a building

with this sense of quiet calm.

It's a platform. It's a very welcoming space.

I think museums have a future because they are a social space.

They're a place in which you have a reason

to switch off your computer

and go and do something with others.

And people actually immediately understand and respond to that.

They've arrived somewhere which is for them.

Obviously when you... when you've got a clean slate,

it's a different... it's a different ballgame.

But I think half the work we do is retuning existing buildings

and learning from them,

and trying to do it in a sensitive way,

but you can never...

you can never sort of please everybody

because of course there were people

who loved the Commonwealth Institute as it was

and so didn't want anything changed.

And then there are people who realised that by saving it

and...and retuning it for the Design Museum

was perhaps a good thing.

We wanted to retain this openness in that central atrium

and we very much wanted people to have this

amazing views of the roof.

So that's how we kept the sort of circular route

through the building,

the way in which from any part of that centre

you can see the beautiful shape of the roof,

and actually the building reveals itself to you.

It was a long process.

From beginning of the project to the end,

it took about eight years.

We had the benefit of working with amazing architects

who were very sensitive to this pre-existing architecture

and who worked with us to redefine it

for the Design Museum.

And so what you see today behind me

is this spectacular building,

with this warm oak panelling that surrounds us.

And that gives it this feeling of warmth.

That feeling also that it's a building for you.

A building for people to come, er, feel at ease with.

You can mill about, sit down on the steps,

on the benches, have a rest, be with your friends

and take in the beautiful architecture

and then make your decision

as to what exhibition you're going to go and see,

the permanent display, or attend a lecture

if that's what you want.

I think what we were really trying to do

was to make a building

that was open to the public and inviting.

[smooth funky music]

We were very much taking this reinvention of the building

and of the museum as a design project,

so we were very focused on our user.

Who is this for?

We wanted to be very welcoming

and we know that for people to feel at ease,

for people actually to enjoy an exhibition

or learn something,

first, they have to feel comfortable.

They have to feel at ease.

If you don't give that,

then there's no hope that you can get to the next level of,

"OK, now I'm going to go and see the exhibition

"and learn something."

[smooth music continues]

We try and tell the story of design

to those who don't really know what design is,

just to make the point that it's not a specialist subject,

because design is everywhere around you.

It's the teacup that you have your tea in the morning.

It's the telephone that you use

and you can't live without today.

It's the...the cars, it's the buildings you're in.

All of this is design, so we're presenting that story.

And then we have gallery spaces

where we go into more specific subjects.

And we look at the visions of the home

actually looking at visions from the past.

And what the past tells us about the day in which we live today

and how technology has completely revolutionised

the way in which we live.

We have in our homes smart objects

that listen to us all the time.

We give away a lot of our privacy.

We live completely mediated by screens.

Actually, all of this, designers of the '50s and '60s imagined.

So, where do we go from now?

From now, where spaces in our home

seems to be shrinking and shrinking.

What's the new challenges?

Narrator: It's impossible to cover

every innovation in design in a building of this size,

so the curators and John Pawson

have had to make difficult choices.

But underpinning all this

is the philosophy of Terence Conran,

who is credited with getting Britain thinking about design

and who has always had a clear idea

of what constitutes good design.

♪ Setting the trends ♪

♪ Making friends ♪

♪ Each day ends like the last... ♪

- We all accept as designers

that style is important

for bringing the goods to the marketplace

and making them fashionable and, you know, of the moment.

But we slightly sneer at it,

something that is, you know, an object

and then an arbitrary styling is slapped all over it,

to me is rather fake.

British style or British character.

Straightforward. Don't mess it around.

Show it as it is.

♪ Setting the trends ♪

♪ Making friends ♪

♪ Each day ends like the last ♪

♪ Hitting the heights ♪

♪ The bright lights ♪

♪ Getting faster ♪

♪ Living for kicks ♪

♪ Gotta mix with the chicks ♪

♪ It's a bore ♪

♪ Men in the air ♪

♪ We don't care... ♪

- And I'll always remember when we opened Habitat,

which I did because as a furniture maker,

I was very frustrated about the fact that I couldn't get

any public distribution for my furniture.

So I thought, "Well, I'll open a shop

"to show that there really is a demand for it."

We wanted to sell to you

because we knew that if we put it in front of you,

then you might say, "Oh, I really like that

"and I can afford it."

But if we went through a buyer in a department store,

they, "Oh, no," you know, never like that.

"No, no, no, no." And so we opened our own shop.

All the other retailers from Glasgow and Manchester

and Liverpool and so forth

came to have a look

and they said, "It's alright in swinging London.

"It'll never go in Manchester area."

And I suppose something in that sort of...

you know, cynicism

made me think, "Well, we'll bloody well show them

"and take it up there."

And of course, you know, what they hadn't recognised

was the...was this big change in the UK.

People beginning to travel,

go round the world, see other things.

And they wanted a different sort of life.

- Britain's one of the first countries

which built an industrial economy

on the fact that it was fascinated by

how we use design to make technology work

in ways that work for people.

And that's something that was around at the time

of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

It's what was going on when William Morris

set up Morris & Company.

It's what was actually behind the starting of

the Royal College of Art not so far down the road.

And Britain has actually been really good at these things.

I mean, Terence, as many pioneers are,

feels sometimes that, um, his efforts fall on

sometimes resistant ground.

But I think Britain is actually an extraordinarily fertile place

for design. We can't rest on our laurels.

And I think one of the reasons to open a museum

is to actually inject that.

We inject that sense of,

"Britain is at the centre of these things."

I wouldn't say this is a museum of British design.

I think this... It's hard to say what British design is.

I think one actually talks more about designed in Britain,

because this is a city... this is a country

which welcomes people from around the world.

Great designers come to learn here

and they stay here and that actually adds

to the richness of the community

that there is in that world here.

Narrator: For Sir Terence,

the old Commonwealth Institute in Kensington

is a dream come true.

The old Design Museum at Shad Thames was popular,

but visitor numbers at the new Design Museum

are in a different league.

I've always thought that design

is too interesting and too complicated

just to leave to people who wear Japanese suits

and have complicated haircuts,

so I've always felt that this stuff matters,

and it's a way really to understand the world around us.

It's not just what things do,

but it's what they mean and how they're made

and what they mean to people that we're looking at here.

- Where we are is a museum of contemporary design.

We talk about what design does and is,

but really how relevant it is to our lives today,

and how it's going to shape our future.

And the buildings that we build create our cities,

and these are the cities that we experience.

So if we build efficient building,

then we're going to live a better life.

If we build efficient transport system,

then we're going to take care of our environment and resources.

Conversely, if we don't...

Well, we're facing some difficult choices very soon.

Narrator: The efforts of Deyan Sudjic, Alice Black

and their teams have paid off.

The new Design Museum won

the European Museum of the Year Award in 2018.

[stirring orchestral music]

So, here we are,

two years after the opening of The Design Museum

and there's an opportunity for those

who've lived and breathed this project for over 10 years

to reflect how visitors have used, and reacted to,

John Pawson's interior spaces.

For me, what John does

is he works incredibly hard

to let the architecture blend in

and you don't even notice

all the quality, the research,

the focus that has gone into creating the environment.

But bit by bit, you'll notice those magical moments.

For example, we have a main atrium

which is right here behind me.

But a little bit further out in the corner,

there's a smaller atrium, and you just happen upon it.

Now, this is a new atrium that John created

because he wanted to evidence the massive buttress

that goes through the floor

and connects to the roof above and supports it.

It's like you move in a little city

and you happen upon a piazza.

It's...it's just a wonderful discovery.

The use of light under the balustrades,

that really, you know,

guides visitor around the building.

This is a concrete building.

It's a pretty harsh structure.

So bringing wood into that building

softens that harshness of the concrete.

And, you know, the wood panelling all around

has got tiny little dots in it.

And this is to make it sound absorbing.

So the acoustics is amazing.

That means that we've had concerts in this building.

We've had performances.

And the stamina's just amazing.

People like to walk around

because from everywhere around this atrium,

you can spot and spy what others are doing,

and that's a lovely feeling.

So when we have events here,

it's such an amazing location,

because you can people watch

and you have a beautiful view

into what's happening in the centre.

Narrator: For Deyan Sudjic,

the creation of the Design Museum

is a personal achievement

that's brought so many strands together,

his desire to give the museum a wider audience,

his admiration for John Pawson,

he wrote a book about him once,

and his personal quest to explain design.

Not to mention the opportunity

to be involved in the art of architecture,

because, as a youngster,

he himself wanted to be an architect.

I was too...I was too impatient and too incompetent

to be an architect,

which is why I became a journalist,

which gives you the sense of instant gratification

of seeing something in print or on the radio, on television.

But over the years, I've been very fortunate

to understand that journalism is essentially

a very selfish activity

where other people are getting in the way

of your chance to express yourself.

The museum and the things I've done previously

are about creating a place in which many people

can find ways to do good things.

Doing this building has been the most fun I've ever had.

Narrator: So, for Deyan Sudjic, there's a reason

to celebrate architecture in the new Design Museum.

And in its first years, one of the main exhibitions

is of the work of the architect Sir David Adjaye,

whose National Museum

of African-American History and Culture in Washington

has won plaudits.

And, in this refined space,

what can we say about John Pawson?

That he's the exact opposite of the 'starchitect'.

That modesty and simplicity,

or 'serenity', as he likes to call it,

have informed his career.

That the Design Museum re-modelling

comes at a point in his life where he's taking stock,

and when his contribution to the life of the nation

is recognised in the Queen's New Year's Honours.

He's been made a CBE.

Next stop, an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

Good thing the idea of becoming a Zen Buddhist monk

didn't work out.

- I'm 70.

And...you know, you...

I suppose it's some sort of wake-up,

and...and...of course I don't think I've changed.

You know, I think I'm, you know, 30 looking out.

It's only when you catch sight, you know, in the reflection

or...or you then...

But I've... I have noticed recently

that people, you know, being a bit...

There's a bit more deference.

Which is really worrying,

'cause it means obviously... [laughs]

you're established or something,

but there is a body of work, which is...

So I guess...

I mean, I've never been one for thinking about legacy

or any of those other things,

but there is a body of work, which, you know, is a broad span

and...and, um...

Yeah. I mean, it's...

It's, you know, it's other buggers' efforts.

But I'm happy to be the focus. [laughs]

Narrator: Next time...

We become accustomed to steel and glass.

But one man continues to draw, design and build

with older methods of materials,

in the classical style.

John Simpson,

a favourite architect of the Prince of Wales,

follows in the footsteps of Palladio, Nash and Adam,

to give the world a new classicism,

which connects the future with the past.

- What needed to happen

was actually to update the tradition

and bring it into the 21st century.

It's not just meet the needs,

but actually take society forward.

Narrator: And now,

after years of designing for others,

John Simpson has made a house for himself.

But it's not what you might expect.

- It's purely a matter of making the whole thing work,

and finding ways of weaving things and stories into it,

and giving it a sort of much more...

Well, having fun, essentially.

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv