The new Design Museum: Prince Charles will prefer it. But should we?

Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become a period style label. Even at the time we acknowledged the layers of irony in this historicist gesture. The Prince, sounding pained, I recall, asked, ‘Mr Bayley, why has it got a flat roof?’ And that was the end of that.

Next time it will be different. The Design Museum is moving from a creatively reused banana warehouse near Tower Bridge to a creatively reused Commonwealth Institute on the edge of Holland Park. For those inclined to see symbolism in such things, there is symbolism here. Prince Charles has not (yet) been asked to officiate at the 2015 opening ceremony, but he will surely approve of the hyperbolic paraboloid roof: a frank denial of old-fashioned rationalism.

The architectural profile of the new Design Museum hints at the more complex realities of the 21st century. The original Design Museum was built to meet philosophically simple needs. Twenty-five years ago, design was not taken seriously — if it was taken at all. The Design Museum was established to remedy that. Terence Conran had provided the money and inspiration, I the chutzpah and the graft.

In its idealism and innocence, it was an unashamedly modernistic project, as the lucid geometry of the building suggested. We knew with absolute clarity what we wanted. Clean lines and clear objectives were our motto. Give people the justification for wanting that elusive better salad bowl and a tubular steel cantilevered chair.