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The boilerhouse project
The InternationalJournal
of Museum Management and Curatorship (1983), 2, 153-158
The Boilerhouse
Project
A New Venture for Museums and for Design STEPHEN BAYLEY
The Boilerhouse Project is unique and new, yet it is in a sense very traditional. It is the first venture of The Conran Foundation, an educational charity established by Terence Conran, Chairman of Habitat/Mothercare, and intended to raise the level of discussion about design and to provide stimulus for students, designers and for manufacturing industry. It is relatively unusual in modern Britain to have private enterprise investing in an institution with a public purpose, but the ideas which move the people concerned with The Conran Foundation can trace their origins to the beginning of the nineteenth century when a Parliamentary Committee published a Report on Arts and Manufactures (1836). Then as now there was an awareness that British industry was failing and there was a similar anxiety about hostility towards imports which we feel today. One hundred and fifty years ago they were concerned about French ribbon and lace, now we are more alarmed by German cars and Japanese electronics, but the place of those commodities in the respective societies was the same and the malaise affecting British industry, noted in 1836, betrayed a crisis in confidence and a crisis of cultural values which remains the same today. If it seems heterodox or irreverent for an enterprise whose end and aim is ultimately industrial, commercial and mercantile to have a home in a celebrated museum of the applied arts, The Conran Foundation can summon to its support the sanction of the past. Henry Cole, founder of that series of institutions which became the Victoria & Albert Museum, once said that he wanted his museum to be specially commercial in so commercial an age. The museums Cole created on his site in rural Brompton were intended to be an abrasive stimulus to the public and at the same time a service to industry and business. The Conran Foundation’s Boilerhouse Project intends to respect this tradition. Although there is an immediate purpose to the work of the Foundation, its activities can perhaps best be understood in some historical perspective. The Boilerhouse is concerned with all aspects of mass-produced material culture or what might, more briefly, be called design. The world has no shortage of museums of applied art: following the practical example of England, museums similar to Cole’s in South Kensington were soon established in the German-speaking and Scandinavian countries (as Nikolaus Pevsner has chronicled in his unsurpassed account of the phenomenon, Academies of Art, Past and Present). These museums were all, in a sense, products of Britain’s industrial revolution. Together with other important institutions, amongst which New York’s Museum of Modern Art was to become outstanding, these museums were influential in establishing design in the eye of the public. But by the late 1970s the types of machine art, ‘gute Form’, or craft-based production which often formed the basis of their exhibitions was coming under scrutiny as models for industrial production. It is in this context, where many designers felt helpless and where industry was starved of fresh exemplary models, that The Conran Foundation came into existence. 0260-4779/83/020153-06$03.00 0 1983Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
154
The Boilerhouse
Project
The Conran Foundation’s Boilerhouse Project is very much the personal initiative of Terence Conran (whose successful chain of Habitat shops sells furniture and household goods in Britain, France, Belgium, the United States and Japan). Conran, who is 51, was trained as a designer, and the style and character of his Habitat stores has been very much influenced by his education in the British art school system, a sophisticated network which owes its own origins to the same reforming impetus as the spirit which moved Henry Cole to create the South Kensington Museum. By the late 1970s Terence Conran’s business had grown to such proportions that a stock exchange listing seemed the sensible course of action and Conran decided that some of the funds raised from the flotation of the company should be put towards a venture which would objectify his own long-term interest in education. With flotation planned for 1979-1980 it was originally anticipated that enough funds would be realized to create a purpose-built structure which would combine the functions of exhibition space, a permanent collection of artifacts, an archive, library, study and design facilities. Although a site in the new city of Milton Keynes was designated, disappointing market conditions led to a postponement of the flotation of Habitat. Consequently, the launch of The Conran Foundation, as yet only an enthusiastically agreed idea shared by Terence Conran and some close associates, was also postponed. Forecourt pump designed by Eliot Noyes for Mobil Oil in 1964 and included in the opening exhibition of The Boilerhouse Project, Art and Industry: A century of design in the products you use, January-March
1982.
155
STEPHENBAYLEY
Interior of The Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria & Albert Museum,
exhibition,
March-June
London, with the Soql Design
1982.
At the same time, Roy Strong, then Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, discovered from Terence Conran (who was a member of the Advisory Council of the Museum) what the plans for the Conran Foundation were and, with characteristic vision and generosity, offered space in the Museum. At once this seemed an exciting and an appropriate opportunity to establish The Conran Foundation. Two unattractive but potentially usable sites were identified: one called Clinch’s Hole, in the middle of the Museum, the other the old boilerhouse yard on the Museum’s western boundary, opposite the entrance to the Science Museum. Of the two, the old boilerhouse yard was chosen, not simply for euphony, but because it seemed to offer a potentially more efficient space for the first generation of activities of The Conran Foundation. At first no integrated space was perceivable, although some daring demolition of partition walls revealed-without catastrophe-what has become one of the biggest integral spaces devoted to design exhibitions anywhere in Europe. ’ The immediate purpose of The Conran Foundation is to put on in The Boilerhouse an exemplary and challenging series of exhibitions about the history, theory, process and practice of design. The first year has seen five exhibitions: the first was called, with a gesture that was consciously backward-looking, Art and Industry: A century of design in the products you use. It set out in a number of documented case studies to scrutinize the conventional art-historical assumption that one of the chief cultural phenomena of the twentieth century was the influence of industry on art, and, by reversing the statement, showed instead how
156
The Boilerhouse Project
artists had in fact influenced the products of industry. The second exhibition was a calculated contrast. It concerned the past, present and future of Sony, the Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics. The contents of this exhibition included a historical survey of key products from Sony’s past, with critical comments, together with a survey of production, some hitherto secret future products and an analysis of how the design function operates in the context of Japanese management. The Sony exhibition was followed by a monographic exhibition about the German designer, Dieter &zms, borrowed from the IDZ-Berlin. Next came an exhibition called 52 Months toJob One: How they designed the Ford Sierra; and the year ended with an exhibition called Memphis Milan0 in London, a presentation of avant-garde furniture, glass, ceramics and fabrics from Italy. Each of these exhibitions had a strong element of novelty: Art and Industry contained new historical research; Sony provided a unique opportunity to see past and future Japanese consumer products in an objective setting; Dieter Rums was the first time a product designer’s work had been analysed at the Victoria & Albert Museum; 52 Months toJob One was the most thoroughly analytical car design exhibition ever held; and Memphis gave the first opportunity to see a representative selection of the extraordinary furniture of the avant-garde group outside the salons of central Milan. The novelty of The Boilerhouse has caused enthusiasm and indignation: it has generated both strong support and heavy criticism. Most of the critical commentary has concentrated on the immediate and trivial aspects of consumer products: the ‘shock’ of seeing a petrol pump in a museum of applied arts, for instance. But the most virulent critics have also generally displayed a reluctance to attempt any very serious analysis of the problems involved in examining material culture. Their views reflect the prejudices which fill the pages of Martin Wiener’s recent book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. The Guardian felt that an exhibition about everyday consumer goods, who designed them and why, might have been ‘calculated to distance the public’, while the Observer declared with some consternation that ‘the work of the industrial designer would be sinister were it not also mildly ridiculous. . .The Boilerhouse is a strange nether-region where the homage paid to goods and gods is wreathed around with dubious assumptions.’ On the other hand, Radio 3’s Critics’ Forum found things to admire: Art and Industry was described as ‘very intelligent . . . [a] model exhibition, easy on the eye, full of information, well done in every way’ and The Financial Times commented: ‘Terence Conran’s new Boilerhouse gallery of industrial design continues to carry a startling message’. It is hoped that exhibitions at the Boilerhouse will continue to generate such excited opinions until The Conran Foundation’s licence to occupy its basement in the Victoria & Albert Museum expires in 1986, at the end of its five-year term. A number of sites have been considered for a permanent home: London’s Docklands, despite the difficulties of effective communication, offers the best compromise of available buildings and appropriate environment, but no firm decision will be taken on a permanent home until the results of the first year’s activities have been analysed and a future programme drawn up. The idea that first motivated Terence Conran was that a permanent ‘collection’ should be created in order to help student and young professional designers in their work and in order to provide salutary exemplars for business and industry. The objectives are still the same, but the means of achieving them is being subtly redefined. As the trawl of historical research moves forward, established museums are beginning to collect modern design. It would be a misuse of The Conran Foundation’s ample, but finite, resources to enter into a competitive field where national institutions are willing to pay E7000 for a Christopher Dresser teapot in order to further their own acquisitions policy (which embraces also, perhaps, Viking ships and Egyptian shrines) the more so when the new technology will allow
STEPHEN BAYLEY
157
progressively more opportunities for access to the kind of imagery and information about material culture which will act as an effective complement to an extension of the traditional idea of the museum as a place where fine and interesting objects are accumulated and displayed.
Dieter Rams exhibition,
organized by the IDZ-Berlin,
at The Boilerhouse
Project, summer
1982.
Certainly, in its permanent home, The Conran Foundation will have some form of permanent collection as a showpiece and it will most definitely continue its programme of temporary exhibitions, but it will refine and develop the role of the modern museum by becoming more and more involved with publishing in its widest sense. Exhibitions will be treated not merely as displays of related artifacts and images which tell a story, but as the raw material for a television recording or video-disc which might either be broadcast or made available to the educational market. It has become apparent in the course of defining The Conran Foundation’s educational policy that the more one is made aware of design as a process the less the significance of the actual object becomes. Thus it will be obvious that The Boilerhouse has an immediate educational purpose and that this purpose is to make available ideas and information about design which have, for one reason or another, been hitherto inaccessible. But there is a higher and more distant goal and this is to make a contribution towards reversing the prejudice against mass-production which has so bedevilled the creation of a civilized industrial society. The prejudice was exemplified in Professor Hendrik Willem van OS’S paper on ‘The Devaluation of Research’ which was published in the first issue of this Journal (1982, pp. 68-72). While Professor van OS may well have a personal preference for treating art as an exclusive subject, for the consideration only of experts working in exclusively academic areas, his polemic against mass culture wilfully ignores the fact that in helping to interest people in the language and the grammar of the
158
The Boilerhouse Project
model of the Ford Sierra suspended over the South Kensington museums complex whilst being lowered into The Boilerhouse Project for the exhibition The Cur Programme, October-November 1982. The clay and fibreglass
everyday you do not have to do without fine art. Learning to appreciate the discipline of designing and making the plastic mug he derides does not prevent enjoyment of a sketch by Ruisdael or Sanraedam, or a maquette by Bernini. It enhances the possibilities of enjoying fine art, but adds something else as well. In studying a Frans Hals with minute precision Professor van OS may look at the painting in every way except the one which might aid an understanding of the forces which created it. In doing this he does not honour the tradition of the subject he professes: Lascaux was community art, Giotto’s campanile was street furniture, and Frans Hals himself was something of a professional illustrator. It is entirely appropriate that The Conran Foundation has begun its life in a museum as celebrated as the Victoria & Albert because the past 100 years have seen artists not only renegotiating their contract with society, but renegotiating as well their relationship with their materials and their media. In talking about the role of the designer, the American critic and designer, George Nelson, compared contemporary life with the Middle Ages when he said that as far as artists are concerned ‘you’ve either got the church or you’ve got IBM’. He did not mean that industry should buy culture; he meant that industry should be culture. The Boilerhouse Project of The Conran Foundation is seeking to encourage this new awareness.
of Museum Management and Curatorship (1983), 2, 153-158
The Boilerhouse
Project
A New Venture for Museums and for Design STEPHEN BAYLEY
The Boilerhouse Project is unique and new, yet it is in a sense very traditional. It is the first venture of The Conran Foundation, an educational charity established by Terence Conran, Chairman of Habitat/Mothercare, and intended to raise the level of discussion about design and to provide stimulus for students, designers and for manufacturing industry. It is relatively unusual in modern Britain to have private enterprise investing in an institution with a public purpose, but the ideas which move the people concerned with The Conran Foundation can trace their origins to the beginning of the nineteenth century when a Parliamentary Committee published a Report on Arts and Manufactures (1836). Then as now there was an awareness that British industry was failing and there was a similar anxiety about hostility towards imports which we feel today. One hundred and fifty years ago they were concerned about French ribbon and lace, now we are more alarmed by German cars and Japanese electronics, but the place of those commodities in the respective societies was the same and the malaise affecting British industry, noted in 1836, betrayed a crisis in confidence and a crisis of cultural values which remains the same today. If it seems heterodox or irreverent for an enterprise whose end and aim is ultimately industrial, commercial and mercantile to have a home in a celebrated museum of the applied arts, The Conran Foundation can summon to its support the sanction of the past. Henry Cole, founder of that series of institutions which became the Victoria & Albert Museum, once said that he wanted his museum to be specially commercial in so commercial an age. The museums Cole created on his site in rural Brompton were intended to be an abrasive stimulus to the public and at the same time a service to industry and business. The Conran Foundation’s Boilerhouse Project intends to respect this tradition. Although there is an immediate purpose to the work of the Foundation, its activities can perhaps best be understood in some historical perspective. The Boilerhouse is concerned with all aspects of mass-produced material culture or what might, more briefly, be called design. The world has no shortage of museums of applied art: following the practical example of England, museums similar to Cole’s in South Kensington were soon established in the German-speaking and Scandinavian countries (as Nikolaus Pevsner has chronicled in his unsurpassed account of the phenomenon, Academies of Art, Past and Present). These museums were all, in a sense, products of Britain’s industrial revolution. Together with other important institutions, amongst which New York’s Museum of Modern Art was to become outstanding, these museums were influential in establishing design in the eye of the public. But by the late 1970s the types of machine art, ‘gute Form’, or craft-based production which often formed the basis of their exhibitions was coming under scrutiny as models for industrial production. It is in this context, where many designers felt helpless and where industry was starved of fresh exemplary models, that The Conran Foundation came into existence. 0260-4779/83/020153-06$03.00 0 1983Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd
154
The Boilerhouse
Project
The Conran Foundation’s Boilerhouse Project is very much the personal initiative of Terence Conran (whose successful chain of Habitat shops sells furniture and household goods in Britain, France, Belgium, the United States and Japan). Conran, who is 51, was trained as a designer, and the style and character of his Habitat stores has been very much influenced by his education in the British art school system, a sophisticated network which owes its own origins to the same reforming impetus as the spirit which moved Henry Cole to create the South Kensington Museum. By the late 1970s Terence Conran’s business had grown to such proportions that a stock exchange listing seemed the sensible course of action and Conran decided that some of the funds raised from the flotation of the company should be put towards a venture which would objectify his own long-term interest in education. With flotation planned for 1979-1980 it was originally anticipated that enough funds would be realized to create a purpose-built structure which would combine the functions of exhibition space, a permanent collection of artifacts, an archive, library, study and design facilities. Although a site in the new city of Milton Keynes was designated, disappointing market conditions led to a postponement of the flotation of Habitat. Consequently, the launch of The Conran Foundation, as yet only an enthusiastically agreed idea shared by Terence Conran and some close associates, was also postponed. Forecourt pump designed by Eliot Noyes for Mobil Oil in 1964 and included in the opening exhibition of The Boilerhouse Project, Art and Industry: A century of design in the products you use, January-March
1982.
155
STEPHENBAYLEY
Interior of The Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria & Albert Museum,
exhibition,
March-June
London, with the Soql Design
1982.
At the same time, Roy Strong, then Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, discovered from Terence Conran (who was a member of the Advisory Council of the Museum) what the plans for the Conran Foundation were and, with characteristic vision and generosity, offered space in the Museum. At once this seemed an exciting and an appropriate opportunity to establish The Conran Foundation. Two unattractive but potentially usable sites were identified: one called Clinch’s Hole, in the middle of the Museum, the other the old boilerhouse yard on the Museum’s western boundary, opposite the entrance to the Science Museum. Of the two, the old boilerhouse yard was chosen, not simply for euphony, but because it seemed to offer a potentially more efficient space for the first generation of activities of The Conran Foundation. At first no integrated space was perceivable, although some daring demolition of partition walls revealed-without catastrophe-what has become one of the biggest integral spaces devoted to design exhibitions anywhere in Europe. ’ The immediate purpose of The Conran Foundation is to put on in The Boilerhouse an exemplary and challenging series of exhibitions about the history, theory, process and practice of design. The first year has seen five exhibitions: the first was called, with a gesture that was consciously backward-looking, Art and Industry: A century of design in the products you use. It set out in a number of documented case studies to scrutinize the conventional art-historical assumption that one of the chief cultural phenomena of the twentieth century was the influence of industry on art, and, by reversing the statement, showed instead how
156
The Boilerhouse Project
artists had in fact influenced the products of industry. The second exhibition was a calculated contrast. It concerned the past, present and future of Sony, the Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics. The contents of this exhibition included a historical survey of key products from Sony’s past, with critical comments, together with a survey of production, some hitherto secret future products and an analysis of how the design function operates in the context of Japanese management. The Sony exhibition was followed by a monographic exhibition about the German designer, Dieter &zms, borrowed from the IDZ-Berlin. Next came an exhibition called 52 Months toJob One: How they designed the Ford Sierra; and the year ended with an exhibition called Memphis Milan0 in London, a presentation of avant-garde furniture, glass, ceramics and fabrics from Italy. Each of these exhibitions had a strong element of novelty: Art and Industry contained new historical research; Sony provided a unique opportunity to see past and future Japanese consumer products in an objective setting; Dieter Rums was the first time a product designer’s work had been analysed at the Victoria & Albert Museum; 52 Months toJob One was the most thoroughly analytical car design exhibition ever held; and Memphis gave the first opportunity to see a representative selection of the extraordinary furniture of the avant-garde group outside the salons of central Milan. The novelty of The Boilerhouse has caused enthusiasm and indignation: it has generated both strong support and heavy criticism. Most of the critical commentary has concentrated on the immediate and trivial aspects of consumer products: the ‘shock’ of seeing a petrol pump in a museum of applied arts, for instance. But the most virulent critics have also generally displayed a reluctance to attempt any very serious analysis of the problems involved in examining material culture. Their views reflect the prejudices which fill the pages of Martin Wiener’s recent book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. The Guardian felt that an exhibition about everyday consumer goods, who designed them and why, might have been ‘calculated to distance the public’, while the Observer declared with some consternation that ‘the work of the industrial designer would be sinister were it not also mildly ridiculous. . .The Boilerhouse is a strange nether-region where the homage paid to goods and gods is wreathed around with dubious assumptions.’ On the other hand, Radio 3’s Critics’ Forum found things to admire: Art and Industry was described as ‘very intelligent . . . [a] model exhibition, easy on the eye, full of information, well done in every way’ and The Financial Times commented: ‘Terence Conran’s new Boilerhouse gallery of industrial design continues to carry a startling message’. It is hoped that exhibitions at the Boilerhouse will continue to generate such excited opinions until The Conran Foundation’s licence to occupy its basement in the Victoria & Albert Museum expires in 1986, at the end of its five-year term. A number of sites have been considered for a permanent home: London’s Docklands, despite the difficulties of effective communication, offers the best compromise of available buildings and appropriate environment, but no firm decision will be taken on a permanent home until the results of the first year’s activities have been analysed and a future programme drawn up. The idea that first motivated Terence Conran was that a permanent ‘collection’ should be created in order to help student and young professional designers in their work and in order to provide salutary exemplars for business and industry. The objectives are still the same, but the means of achieving them is being subtly redefined. As the trawl of historical research moves forward, established museums are beginning to collect modern design. It would be a misuse of The Conran Foundation’s ample, but finite, resources to enter into a competitive field where national institutions are willing to pay E7000 for a Christopher Dresser teapot in order to further their own acquisitions policy (which embraces also, perhaps, Viking ships and Egyptian shrines) the more so when the new technology will allow
STEPHEN BAYLEY
157
progressively more opportunities for access to the kind of imagery and information about material culture which will act as an effective complement to an extension of the traditional idea of the museum as a place where fine and interesting objects are accumulated and displayed.
Dieter Rams exhibition,
organized by the IDZ-Berlin,
at The Boilerhouse
Project, summer
1982.
Certainly, in its permanent home, The Conran Foundation will have some form of permanent collection as a showpiece and it will most definitely continue its programme of temporary exhibitions, but it will refine and develop the role of the modern museum by becoming more and more involved with publishing in its widest sense. Exhibitions will be treated not merely as displays of related artifacts and images which tell a story, but as the raw material for a television recording or video-disc which might either be broadcast or made available to the educational market. It has become apparent in the course of defining The Conran Foundation’s educational policy that the more one is made aware of design as a process the less the significance of the actual object becomes. Thus it will be obvious that The Boilerhouse has an immediate educational purpose and that this purpose is to make available ideas and information about design which have, for one reason or another, been hitherto inaccessible. But there is a higher and more distant goal and this is to make a contribution towards reversing the prejudice against mass-production which has so bedevilled the creation of a civilized industrial society. The prejudice was exemplified in Professor Hendrik Willem van OS’S paper on ‘The Devaluation of Research’ which was published in the first issue of this Journal (1982, pp. 68-72). While Professor van OS may well have a personal preference for treating art as an exclusive subject, for the consideration only of experts working in exclusively academic areas, his polemic against mass culture wilfully ignores the fact that in helping to interest people in the language and the grammar of the
158
The Boilerhouse Project
model of the Ford Sierra suspended over the South Kensington museums complex whilst being lowered into The Boilerhouse Project for the exhibition The Cur Programme, October-November 1982. The clay and fibreglass
everyday you do not have to do without fine art. Learning to appreciate the discipline of designing and making the plastic mug he derides does not prevent enjoyment of a sketch by Ruisdael or Sanraedam, or a maquette by Bernini. It enhances the possibilities of enjoying fine art, but adds something else as well. In studying a Frans Hals with minute precision Professor van OS may look at the painting in every way except the one which might aid an understanding of the forces which created it. In doing this he does not honour the tradition of the subject he professes: Lascaux was community art, Giotto’s campanile was street furniture, and Frans Hals himself was something of a professional illustrator. It is entirely appropriate that The Conran Foundation has begun its life in a museum as celebrated as the Victoria & Albert because the past 100 years have seen artists not only renegotiating their contract with society, but renegotiating as well their relationship with their materials and their media. In talking about the role of the designer, the American critic and designer, George Nelson, compared contemporary life with the Middle Ages when he said that as far as artists are concerned ‘you’ve either got the church or you’ve got IBM’. He did not mean that industry should buy culture; he meant that industry should be culture. The Boilerhouse Project of The Conran Foundation is seeking to encourage this new awareness.