John Pawson, OMA, West 8 and Arup were all asked to come together to design The New Design Museum in London. Their design will accommodate up to 500,000 visitors per year. Notable for its superb complex hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof intended by the architects to symbolize a tent in the park, it is regarded by English Heritage as the second most important modern building in London, after the Royal Festival Hall. Plans to bring the new design to fruition is scheduled to be completed by 2014. More images and architects’ description after the break.
At the moment, the present building is in very poor condition, but with full support from London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, Conran, the Design Museum’s Director Deyan Sudjic, and his Trustees have already raised 60% of the €53 million (£44.5 million) it needs towards the total budget of €95 million (£80 million), from trusts, foundations and individuals.
The new Museum will triple the amount of spaces Sudjic has, transforming the former Institute in a way that will allow it to show all of its collection, and be far more extensive than its first home in the 1980s in the old boilerhouse of the V&A Museum, where there was little scope to expand further.
Architect John Pawson, renowned for his rigorously simple architecture, is converting the Institute building’s enormous central hall, a concrete shell with tiered exhibition spaces (in its day showing the transition from Empire to Commonwealth) linked by walkways, which has a certain shopping mall quality about it.
To embellish this “true icon” of post war British Modernism he is using concrete terrazzo, and hard woods as well as recycled materials from the existing building.
