The Plans
Exterior image of the new Design Museum at the Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington, London. The redesign of the Grade 2* listed building will be done by John Pawson Ltd.
Entrance Foyer. John Pawson Ltd. Image by Alex Morris Visualisation.
The new building will open to the public in 2016, giving the Design Museum three times more space to showcase its unique collection, double its visitor numbers to 500,000 a year and greatly expand its education and public events programme with state-of-the-art-facilities.
Second Floor, John Pawson Ltd. Image by Alex Morris Visualisation.
The move will allow the new Design Museum to become a word class centre for design, nurturing British talent and its international influence on design of all kinds. It will bring the museum into Kensington’s cultural quarter, where it will join the V&A, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Royal College of Art and Serpentine Gallery, creating a platform for the promotion and support of the next generation of creative talent.
About John Pawson
John Pawson has spent thirty years making rigorously simple architecture, based on the qualities of proportion, light and materials, which speaks of the fundamentals, but is also modest in character. Private houses remain a consistent strand, but the body of work spans a wide range of scales and building typologies, ranging from Calvin Klein Collection’s flagship store in Manhattan and airport lounges for Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong, to a condominium for Ian Schrager on New York’s Gramercy Park, a 50-metre ketch and sets for new ballets at London’s Royal Opera House and the Opéra Bastille in Paris. Over the years Pawson has accrued extensive experience of the particular challenges of working within environments of historic, landscape and ecological significance, key examples including the Sackler Crossing - a walkway over the lake at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - the Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur in Bohemia and the former Commonwealth Institute in London, scheduled to open as a new permanent home for the Design Museum in 2016.
