London's Design Museum Lives Under a Copper Roof Built for the Commonwealth

On Tuesday, November 6, 1962, Queen Elizabeth II opened a new building on Kensington High Street in London. It was the Commonwealth Institute, and its most striking feature sat on top of it, a roof that rose and fell like a tent pulled tight at the corners. The copper on that roof, 25 tonnes of it, had been donated by the Northern Rhodesia Chamber of Mines, in the country now called Zambia.

This week the building turns 64, and on November 24 it marks ten years as the home of the Design Museum. Few buildings in London have had a stranger second life, and fewer have been rescued by a museum whose whole subject is how things are made.

A roof with a message

The institute had a long history before it had this building. It began as the Imperial Institute, founded by royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1888, and changed its name to the Commonwealth Institute in 1958, as the empire gave way to a club of independent countries. The new building gave the new name a modern face.

It was designed by Robert Matthew Johnson Marshall and Partners, the firm known as RMJM. Its roof is a hyperbolic paraboloid, a shape that curves up in one direction and down in the other, so that a surface made from straight lines ends up looking like a saddle or a tent. It is both efficient and dramatic, which suited a building that wanted to look modern and open. The Wikipedia history of the Commonwealth Institute records that the building was listed Grade II star in 1988, and that the listing was for its roof.

That listing saved it. In 2002 the member countries decided the institute would cease its activities and sell the building, and the property on Kensington High Street closed in 2004. A protected roof over an empty exhibition hall is a hard thing to sell. The developer Chelsfield Partners bought it in April 2007, and the local council and English Heritage approved revised plans in September 2009.

A museum looking for a bigger room

The Design Museum was the other half of the answer. Terence Conran founded it in 1989, with Stephen Bayley as its first chief executive, and for its first decades it lived in a former 1940s banana warehouse at Shad Thames. It outgrew the space. In June 2011 Conran gave £17.5 million to fund a move, according to the Wikipedia history of the Design Museum.

The work on the old institute was shared out. Allies and Morrison, according to its own project page, prepared the listed structure for an interior by John Pawson, working with OMA, which also designed three new apartment buildings on the site. Arup handled the engineering. The roof was propped while the building beneath it was stripped back and restored, a new basement was dug, and new floors were put in. Allies and Morrison gives the project's area as 21,777 square meters.

The museum opened in its new home on November 24, 2016. Inside, Pawson's galleries open onto a tall central atrium, with the underside of the 1962 roof overhead. Two years later, the museum says, it was named European Museum of the Year.

The building's two lives, by our count

We lined up the dates from the Commonwealth Institute and Design Museum entries on Wikipedia and the architects' project page. The gaps are our own arithmetic.

The numbers tell a plain story. The building served its first purpose for 42 years and then sat without one for 12, from the closure in 2004 to the museum's opening in 2016. The Design Museum spent about 27 years at Shad Thames before the move, and it has now been in Kensington for ten.

Visiting now

The building is worth the trip for its own sake. The permanent collection display, Designer Maker User, is free and sits on the second level, close enough to the roof to see how the saddle shape works from underneath. The ticketed exhibition this season is Es Devlin: Other Worlds, which the museum describes as the first retrospective in Europe of her 30 years of work, running until April 4, 2027.

Go on a weekday morning, walk around the outside first to see the roof, and then stand in the atrium and look up. For more design history in the same spirit, read our pieces on Dieter Rams, on Memphis and Ettore Sottsass, and on Tadao Ando's buildings, and if you are making a trip of it, our guide to London's Soho and Dover Street Market. The whole Design section has more.