Go West?

Cast adrift at the bottom of Holland Park, the curvaceous concrete tent of the Commonwealth Institute has languished empty for the past 12 years, like a discarded relic of a vague and outdated idea, a 1960s Millennium Dome.

The fact that it is finally to be given a new lease of life as the new home for the Design Museum, lavished with an £80 million makeover, should be welcomed. That it will be comprehensively gutted by John Pawson, and tightly hemmed in by three “generic” housing blocks by OMA, might be a less appealing prospect. But these are the commercial realities needed to leverage enough Section 106 money - £40 million from developer Chelsfield - to make it happen.

Pawson’s proposal inserts five new floors within RMJM’s existing grade II* listed shell, providing 10,000sq m of space in a characteristically “quiet and simple palette” of concrete terrazzo and hardwood. The circular mezzanine dais and its suspended staircases will be ripped out, but the plans look to retain views through to the soaring roof with a progressively widening atrium, while access from the park will be opened up with glazed facades to the north and east.

OMA’s blocks will frame the building on three sides, following the institute’s geometry at 45 degrees to Kensington High Street, with simple gridded elevations that “try to pay tribute to the period,” as partner Reinier de Graaf puts it. “It is an exercise in being humble, an effort to fade into the background,” he says. “At least for once.” But of course this is humility OMA-style: a nine-storey concrete cube will stand between the museum and the street.

Design Museum director, Deyan Sudjic, intends this new home to “do for design what the Tate Modern did for contemporary art,” declaring it is “time to move beyond the niche”. He hopes that tripling the size of the museum will double visitor numbers to at least 500,000, and sees the move west representing “a move back to our natural neighbours and friends” - rejoining the cultural quarter of the Victoria & Albert, Natural History and Science Museums, Royal Colleges of Art and Music and Imperial College.

What the plan neglects to realise is that this building is in fact a good half hour hike from the V&A, far removed from the conceptual heart of Albertopolis – that quaint term of the 1850s, coined to celebrate, and somewhat satirise, the prince’s role in Victorian cultural life.

But when Terence Conran originally moved the Design Museum to its current home, a former banana warehouse in the wastelands of 1980s Shad Thames, he was similarly pooh-poohed. “Developer friends told me nobody would cross the river,” he recalls.

With “fringe” east London galleries beginning to move west, perhaps we should not underestimate the Midas touch of the ageing design tycoon and the new Design Museum heralding the revival of the Kensington Conranopolis.