15th September 2018

V&A Dundee opens its doors

The Victoria and Albert Museum opened its first institution outside London, when it welcomed visitors to a striking waterfront base in Dundee.

The £80m building, Scotland’s first design museum, was designed by Kengo Kuma and built using more than 2,400 concrete panels, offset from one another so the shadows they cast change throughout the day. Inspired by the cliffs of the Scottish coast, their unusual stacking is intended to blur the distinction between dry land and the River Tay.

Scottish exhibits

When filling the new gallery, V&A curators gathered exhibits from the 12,000 Scottish items in its existing collection and borrowed objects from other Scottish collections.

It has dedicated Scottish Design Galleries, of which Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room is a permanent exhibit. This 13.5-metre long double-height room was originally designed for Catherine Cranston’s tea room in Glasgow’s Ingram Street.

The Guardian was impressed by the reconstructed tea room, with writer Rowan Moore, on opening day, calling it “a beautiful ensemble of light, structure and ornament”, but he was less complimentary about the building itself that while “a memorable, impressive object, already popular for fashion shoots and car promotions, which will do its job of announcing Dundee’s ambition to the world” didn’t allow visitors to see enough of its impressive setting once they’d set foot inside.

V&A’s Dundee links

The BBC News website reported three days before its opening that “Philip Long, the director of V&A Dundee, says the city chose the V&A, not the other way around. There was no competition, bidding process or shortlist, he says. The process that led to the decision was ‘much more organic than that’.

The V&A already had a close relationship with the University of Dundee, because of the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, which is linked to it… In 2007 the first serious conversations [between Dundee City Council and the] V&A began, followed by a feasibility study and Scottish government support. In 2010 a partnership company was formed to make the museum a reality but it has still taken eight years.”

Royal opening

The museum was opened by Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Earl and Countess of Strathearn (Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in England) in January the following year, by which point it had already attracted almost 400,000 visitors, of whom 27,000 visited in its first week.