“I’ve always been attracted to the momentum of institutions,” begins the art historian Tim Marlow. “I like a busy place. I want to bring different audiences and for them to have communal experiences in a shared space.” He clarifies: “This is what museums do best.” As director and chief executive of the Design Museum in London, a position he’s held since 2019, he’s in a prime spot to achieve this.
I’m meeting Marlow at the museum west of the city in Kensington, housed in the former Grade II* listed Commonwealth Institute. A curious building with its place in time, it opened in 1962 to inform and educate about the Commonwealth of Nations. The listing notes say its founding came “at a critical moment in the evolution of the modern Commonwealth out of the old Empire.” Meanwhile, the design and displays conveyed a “sense of idealism and a new start.” It, therefore, feels like a fitting place to be occupied by a museum also attempting to define a nation finding its place in a very different era.
Opened in 2016, the Design Museum was reimagined and redesigned by the architect John Pawson. It is tucked away on the side of Holland Park but without direct access or views into one of London’s loveliest green spaces. Still, the building is impressive, vast, inviting, and a stone’s throw away from some of our other significant collections of past and contemporary treasures at the V&A.
Marlow’s office has expansive views over a bustling workplace where, today, his young team are busy at work. “The sheer energy that comes from different projects with different approaches, and all existing in the same building, this is what interests me,” he says as his assistant brings in a couple of double espressos.
Design — how we engage with it as a concept and understand it as a discipline — has transformed dramatically since 1989. That was the year when the late Sir Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley opened the original Design Museum in its more modest Shad Thames site in a former 1940s banana warehouse on the other side of London. A space dedicated to contemporary design, showcasing what many would have viewed as everyday objects, was a radical concept. Then, museums and galleries were reserved for the high arts, the visual arts, not the applied arts and certainly not objects with little historical value.
The efforts of Conran and Bayley paved the way for teaching design theory and history at the university level. The discipline felt so fresh and exciting, less formal than the teachings of art history at the time — something that I got to experience first-hand, and it was all so thrilling.
Marlow agrees with the impact of that first museum space dedicated purely to contemporary design. Yet he is acutely aware that what was relevant in the 90s may not be so now. “On the one hand, the complexity of design offers us massive opportunities to tap into different audiences with each exhibition. Then, on the other hand, with the subject being so vast, how do you select what to show? It comes down to resonance, relevance, opportunity and a personal belief that this is the right thing to do at this moment.” Warming to the idea, he continues, “both the pragmatic and ideological drive our ideas; the key is in presenting them in a way that takes the audience with you. I believe in design affording us the chance to look at familiar things in different ways.”
“Football: Designing the Beautiful Game,” staged last year at the museum, did precisely that. Football/soccer is a global game, a subject most can identify with. “Design underpins football: from its kit to technology, graphic and stadium design. It, therefore, allows us to survey the game in new ways. The same could be said of music, which is why we looked at Amy Winehouse from the lens of design,” he says, referring to the 2021 exhibition “Amy: Beyond the Stage.”
Marlow wants to be expansive, offering exhibitions that address as many facets of our contemporary life as possible. A current show, for instance, looks at surrealism’s impact on design. Soon artist Ai Weiwei will take over the museum with his first show focusing on design, inviting us to meditate on value and humanity, art and activism. Meanwhile, an exhibition this summer celebrates the contemporary Indian sari.
Marlow insists he’s not too concerned with gaining a mass audience. “If you chase a populist rather than a popular agenda, you can get found out in the museum world, and it can be dangerous. Design is such a broad subject that it can attract disparate audiences. My aim for the museum is to make it a design hub, which means looking at all different audiences, be it age, social, political and racial.”
On the day of my visit, the museum is surprisingly lively for a drizzly Monday afternoon, with visitors of all ages, including lots of uniformed kids on a school outing. I’m pleasantly surprised, as on previous expeditions, the Pawson building had been a quiet, underwhelming space, dare I say a little clinical for my taste which is more attuned to wondrous spaces like the V&A.
I tell Marlow of my earlier observation. “This is music to my ears,” he beams. “This is what I want to generate more of. Museums have their own histories and trajectories, and I understand the ambition to scale up. When Terrance (Conran) came up with the idea, the nation didn’t have a design museum. The V&A deals with the past and present; we look at the present and future.”
Marlow is in an exciting position to assess how best to do this. In his previous role as artistic director of the Royal Academy of Arts, he helped the historic London gallery evolve to bring in younger audiences through a more expansive curational project. He also led the extension by another leading architect David Chipperfield which, when completed in 2018, helped expand the RA’s reach.
I comment on how much I admire Chipperfield’s subtle intervention that connects the two buildings — 6 Burlington Gardens and Burlington House — and offers a new auditorium and galleries so the RA can now have an exhibition space permanently dedicated to architecture. It’s helped make the building so much more alive.
“I need to rough up this elegant John Pawson conversion, too,” Marlow muses. “There is the opportunity to put more in this space.” And bringing in new audiences and engaging with diverse groups emotionally and practically is at the top of his agenda. “We have one of the youngest and most culturally diverse audiences in any institution in London, 50% are under 35, but we have to build on this.”
Initiatives such as “Entrepreneur’s Hub,” where those with fewer opportunities are mentored and funded on their design projects, and “Design Ventura,” a program that works closely on design education with schools, will certainly help towards this goal. Yet, Marlow is also acutely aware of the lack of diversity in the field of design in this country. Unlike in music and fashion, where there are visible role models, with industrial and product design, and in architecture, the scene is “very monocultural,” he suggests. “Liberal institutions like universities and museums cannot change the landscape, but maybe we can help.”
The Design Museum is largely a charity organization, with profits from ticket sales going directly back into the exhibitions. The space has worked with themed exhibitions as well as single-brand retrospectives. I ask Marlow how he gauges the commercial side while maintaining an independent voice. “It must be a balanced program. Compared to the visual arts, design offers the opportunity to work more broadly with individuals, brands, entrepreneurs, and even venture capitalists. And so it is part of the brief to explore these areas because design never happens in abstraction. The great designers have always been commissioned by or have worked with an organization.”
Marlow landed the Design Museum role only months before the closure of public spaces due to the pandemic. And, like so many, it had been a reflective time for him. “We came out of lockdown with a renewed purpose,” he concedes. “I realized how much design holds the key to how we deal with catastrophes and opportunities. Design is responsible for so much of the environmental damage, but it can also be the way out of it.
“I’d like to get to a position where I can raise enough funding so we can be the museum that examines and showcases all sorts of different ideas. We are the national design museum and should be doing this. This is what I mean by being a design hub.”
See why industrial designer Chris Bangle makes a compelling case for a truly radical rethink of car design here. And take a look at Norman Foster’s ode to the automobile at the Guggenheim Bilbao here.
