# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Andrea Harari of jaggedart gallery on the Crafting a Difference exhibition: a collaboration between five galleries, which can be viewed in 3D online

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ahead of its opening next week, architect Piers Gough RA gets a sneak preview of the museum's new home - a reworking of the former Commonwealth Institute in London's Holland Park.

From the Winter 2016 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

The hyperbolic paraboloid has great architectural appeal. It's a curved "saddle" shape that can be geometrically constructed entirely from straight lines, which obviates a lot of the cost of constructing curves. Hence in the 1950s and '60s the plethora of those swoopy, pointy cornered roofs, usually in turquoise copper, over everything from car showrooms to churches.

The Commonwealth Institute in London's Holland Park, designed by Robert Matthew in 1960, was just such a structure, a "tent in the park" that sported a thin split hyperbolic paraboloid roof supported by a solid central concrete one underneath (pictured above). The non-hierarchical square-plan building, now listed Grade II*, housed multi-level displays of objects from the Commonwealth's far-flung dominions around a central circular mezzanine like a suspended circus ring.

It has been the fate or duty of the arts institutions of this heritage country to eschew new buildings in favour of historic ones in need of TLC. Hence Tate Modern at Bankside Power Station, the Courtauld at Somerset House, the Whitechapel's extension into an adjacent library, the Saatchi Gallery in former military barracks and the Royal Academy's own Burlington Gardens expansion project are all redevelopments of historic buildings.

The Design Museum has done its bit, first colonising the old boilerhouse of the V&A, then moving trendily east by converting a modernist warehouse on the river at Butlers Wharf, and now moving trendily back west again by taking over the shell of the Commonwealth Institute. The museum's founder Terence Conran, who has brilliantly and generously steered it through all these manifestations, is himself a dab hand at revivifying gorgeous old buildings such as Michelin House on the Fulham Road.

Bringing the Design Museum to the Commonwealth Institute is a particularly felicitous fit, reusing an exhibition building for, well, exhibitions! With this in mind English Heritage has allowed interesting interior features to be repositioned, enabling a total gut and reconstruction inside the shell. Despite the swoopy roof, the exterior was rather austere with its all-round blanked-out curtain walling. The conversion makes full use of the glazing to provide light and give great views into Holland Park.

The famously minimalist architect John Pawson has restructured and transformed the interior of the building into a series of magnificent spaces for all aspects of a modern museum experience: looking, reading, listening, learning, eating, shopping or just fannying around taking selfies. Nearly half of the ground floor is one big seductive gallery, a double-colonnaded space like a modern version of the Venice Arsenale. The super-high new basement provides another gallery and a large raked-seating lecture hall - a great addition to the Design Museum's ability to expand audiences and stage events.

The top floor (pictured above) houses the permanent collection, but the bold designer Morag Myerscough banishes any whiff of stolid worthiness by arranging it as a super instruction kit on how to design good stuff. Suitably sandwiched on the first floor are a library, learning centre and admin offices, with the aforementioned lovely views over the park.

All these spaces are accessed and visually held together by the spectacular centrepiece entrance space. This is a public square within the square building with no hint of monastic minimalism, rather a grand warmly oak-lined ziggurat of an atrium. Boulevard-wide internal terraces sweep around each floor and mezzanine, leading to all the functions. The now ubiquitous wide flight of sitting steps, watered by an adjacent café, attractively starts the journey upwards. This extravagantly scaled, beautifully detailed space is topped off by Myerscough's searing super graphics at the top floor, displayed on one of those rotating advertising billboards. It's like Conran's cigar box got a Las Vegas lid.

The scale of the new building allows a matching scale of ambition for the Director Deyan Sudjic to run continuous and overlapping programmes of big exhibitions on design and architecture. It is with the latter that he will challenge the Royal Institute of British Architects, the RA and the V&A. It should demonstrate again the size of the untapped appetite for architectural as well as design exhibitions and discourse. Kensington High Street pretty much lost its mojo with the demise of Barkers, Pontings, Derry & Toms and then the Biba department stores. This hyperbolic Design Museum should go a long way to restoring its public paraboloid.
London's Design Museum reopens on High Street Kensington on 24 November.

Enjoyed this article?

Become a Friend to receive RA Magazine

As well as free entry to all of our exhibitions, Friends of the RA enjoy one of Britain's most respected art magazines, delivered directly to your door. Why not join the club?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A look inside the new Design Museum | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ahead of its opening next week, architect Piers Gough RA gets a sneak preview of the museum's new home - a reworking of the former Commonwealth Institute in London's Holland Park.

# data[].attributes.headline
250 WORDS - A REFLECTION ON CONTRIBUTION

# data[].attributes.subject
250 WORDS - A REFLECTION ON CONTRIBUTION

# data[].attributes.body
VISUAL BOARD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Check out this Poster (Portrait) designed by shaxlin H.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Few sporting cultures have influenced fashion as heavily as skateboarding. It's rare for a season to pass without some wink, nod, or homage to the midcentury California-born pastime (and, as of 2020-turned-2021, Olympic category). Currently, for example: Gucci offered up skateboard bags on the runway in Seoul for its Cruise 2024 collection. Chopova Lowena showed Spring 2024 in a skatepark, with aesthetics nodding to "the skater boy you love." Of his Spring 2024 concept, Bluemarble 's Anthony Alvarez said he has always been intrigued by California's skate culture and its "forever young mindset." Even Miu Miu, recently crowned the hottest brand in the world by the Lyst Index, showed ultra-low riding chino pants and baggy shorts-silhouettes that have long been associated with skatewear-on its latest runway.

More than most, the sport is a catwalk mainstay. And now, its three-quarter century history is being examined through a neatly conceived and tightly edited exhibition called Skateboard, supported by Converse, at London's Design Museum. A book by the same name is being released by Phaidon in tandem.

Skateboard examines the fundamentality of its namesake device. The show is an object study at its core; it tracks the backstory of the board across generations' worth of iterations (one 2000's deck features baroque squiggles called "money shapes" on its edge, for instance). Yet it also provides a crisp, clear flow of the world-building that has occurred around the apparatus.

Over 100 chronologically advancing decks, their widely varied graphics, images sourced from over 40 photographers in multiple decades, and spin-off ephemera (such as zines and decals) illustrate this rise of skateboarding not only as an athletic discipline but also as an aspirational lifestyle. A 1960s-era Life cover, for example, shows a woman in neat white trousers riding against a big blue sky-while doing a handstand on her board, no less.

The show's curator, the industrial designer and author (and skater himself) Jonathan Olivares, calls the decks the "spine" of the exhibition, but that "you get everything, the style of [skateboarding], the universe of it, through them." The exhibit follows a trompe l'oeil double yellow line-the kind you see on streets, the natural realm of skateboarding-weaving between vitrines at waist-level and beneath supersized photographs that hang from the ceiling.

There are interesting moments when the sport and fashion collide. Olivares points to an image of a short-short wearing subject, circa the 1960s, and says: "Even though it gets cold in England, skaters in the U.K. would sometimes wear shorts for the feeling of California." And Converse itself-best known amongst fashion-philes for its popular and permanent collaboration with Commes des Garçons-features throughout. The Nike-owned company wasn't founded as a skateboarding brand, but it has long been assimilated within the skate community (it also has a pro skating team).

One deck, a twin tail used by the skater Ishod Wair in 2013, features a print depicting a 1990s-era Coogie sweater, made popular in part by the rapper Notorious B.I.G. Olivares makes an interesting point in this regard. He says chapters of skateboarding style, and by extension the fashion around them, have been directly inspired by music-based cultural shifts. "Punk had a huge influence on skate in the early 1980s," he says. "It was massive. By the mid-1990s, though, skate just fully adopted hip-hop, with the one exception being you'd be wearing bulky skate shoes. Whether you lived in the New York suburbs or in Queens, you wanted to look like Mobb Deep when you skated. Not everyone, but a lot of people."

Eyeing a Palace Skateboards deck, I ask Olivares about high fashion's more contemporary-and direct-embraces of skateboarding. Palace is a London-based label founded by a group of guys who used to skate the city's South Bank. It was born with humble, sport-specific beginnings. Yet in 2022, Palace released a well-received global collaboration with Gucci. Supreme, the New York-based brand that started as a skateboard label, reached feverish recognition when it collaborated with Louis Vuitton in 2017. The late designer Virgil Abloh, who was also a skater, recognized the sport's wardrobe appeal and weaved it into his work at both Off-White and Louis Vuitton (post-Supreme). There are many other examples.

"I think it's all good," Olivares says. "Skaters can tend to be a little cagey, but I think of the late editor of Thrasher, Jake Phelps, who said he loved every aspect of it. That there's really no wrong answer in skateboarding." (Thrasher, for those unfamiliar, is an indie skate magazine founded in 1981-for a time in the twenty-teens, its typeface logo became the it motif on the street style scene.)

"When we first started this, the museum thought maybe we'd put in a 'skate fashion' section. My feeling was like, that's just part of the game. All you have to do is look."
"Skateboard

" runs from October 20, 2023 to June 4, 2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Skateboard," a New Exhibition at London's Design Museum, Tracks the Sport's Stylistic and Cultural Evolution Over 75 Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Skateboard" features over 100 decks, images from over 40 photographers, and spin-off ephemera; it runs from October 20 to June 4, 2024.