Jonathan Morrison
Museum review: V&A Dundee
As a design it has its flaws, but with the resources of the V&A collection to draw on, the new building will prove a consummate cultural success
Inspired by the striations of nearby cliffs, but for all the world resembling some huge, clinker-built medieval merchantman about to heave into the North Sea, the new V&A Dundee is a place of some magic and many contradictions. Yet there can be little doubt that it has already become a symbol of the city’s renaissance as surely as the Guggenheim in Bilbao on which it was modelled.
The museum is intended as a celebration of the history of Dundee, and the acts and artefacts of design (HUFTON + CROW)
That this outpost of the London institution has already been embraced by taxi drivers and chip shop customers, and is fondly referred to as “V & Tay” in honour of the dark river it overhangs, is nothing less than remarkable considering its troubled gestation: commissioned at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, it somehow survived an almost doubling of costs from £45 million to more than£80 million, delays in construction and wrangling with the complexity of the design, which is based on a pair of intersecting inverted pyramids. Even three years ago, it looked like it might not happen. So perhaps no building since the Scottish parliament, finished in 2004, has been so anticipated north of the border as the V&A Dundee, the country’s first design museum: likewise, it may divide wider opinion.
It has been nicknamed the “V & Tay”, after the river over which it hangs (HUFTON + CROW)
Certainly, Kengo Kuma, one of the greatest living Japanese architects, has conjured and sculpted an icon. No one can deny the originality and carefulness of the design, the craftsmanship and precision that went into its tiers and tiles, the generosity of detailing and intent. The shifting angular structure is simultaneously geological and nautical, at times forming an arch framing the river mouth, but can also be a little forbidding, oppressive even: the façade a granite fortress, the pools a freezing moat. Sadly, from at least one angle it has the heavy presence of a squashed multistorey car park. It is not particularly welcoming, not even in the gruff Scots way, which is strange considering that Kuma’s stated aim was to “give the city a living room”.
The building survived a virtual doubling of costs (to more than £80 million) and delays in construction (HUFTON + CROW)
Inside, much of the space is rendered unusable by the angular design, with large slopes covered by uneven wooden slats and punctured by small, inaccessible windows cut through like loopholes. Fully half the building seems given over to the inevitable shop-and-café-cum-atrium, but sitting there, you may feel as if you have accidentally climbed out of a top-floor window and become lost among slanting rooftops.
Upstairs, it is a happier story and storey: there are studios, a restaurant overlooking Scott and Shackleton’s old ship Discovery, a terrace, floor-to-ceiling windows and two galleries for travelling shows — at present Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which has been transplanted from the V&A in London — and the permanent exhibition on Scottish design with more than 300 eclectic artefacts.
With the resources of the V&A to draw on, it’s unlikely that the new outpost will prove anything less than a consummate cultural success. Yet as a building, it has its flaws. Corners have been cut, quite literally, to fashion something so unusual and unique. But does that really matter when the people of Dundee like it so much?
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