The cascading log steps in the museum are like the waves outside the window.
Enter Scottish art time and space at the V&A
Text, photo/Zhang Lushi
This article was first published in China News Weekly, No. 892
He has set foot in Scotland many times, but he has never found a reason to visit Dundee, a small town by the Thai River. But since the opening of the V&A (Victoria and Albert) Design Museum, this little-known town has suddenly become a fresh and popular destination.
Near the mouth of the sea, Dundee played the role of an international jute trading center during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Since the 21st century, like Glasgow, the small city has opened the waterside new area planning, and hitched a ride on the express train of "gentrification".
The town is really small, and it is a ten minute drive from Dundee Airport to the city center. On the banks of the Misty Tai River, I saw two behemoths: the brand-new V&A Museum on the left, and the discovery three-masted ship of almost equal size on the right: a traditional wooden three-masted ship built for Antarctic scientific expeditions more than a century ago, it was in Dundee. In 1901, British explorers Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton boarded the ship to complete the Expedition discovery. The ship returned to Dundee Harbour in 1986. You know, in Arthur Charles Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the fictional spacecraft Discoverer One pays homage to the ship.
The location where the ship is now moored is named "Discovery Point". Since the industrial revolution receded, Dundee has managed to revive its prestige, but this time it has been a cultural development: since 2001, the Dundee government has drawn up a new 30-year urban plan, investing 1 billion pounds (about 9 billion yuan) to develop the "Discovery Point" and adjacent riverside. The building where the new Hotel Indigo is located was formerly the workshop of a jute textile factory, and another nearby textile factory was converted into a jute museum. In the future, the area will also have a huge amusement park, city beach and ice rink. The V&A Museum, which has been open for two months, is also an important part of the plan. Dundee is the UK's first UNESCO-recognised "Capital of Design", which is a cold knowledge even in the UK.
The V&A is Scotland's first design museum, and with the london V&A's years of international fame, the branch has long attracted attention before it was unveiled. When the more than £81 million (more than 700 million yuan) project was invited to architects around the world in 2010, it underscored a demand: a desire to recreate Dundee's old maritime days.
Kengo Kuma, the Japanese architect who eventually broke through 120 design proposals, was inspired by a cliff map on the northeast coast of Scotland to design this museum with an abstract concept. He designed the River Tay in a neutral manner: the concrete of the outer wall mimics the steep coastal cliffs, hulls and waves, while the stacked logs of the inner wall deliberately imitate the waves.
Walking around the museum, when it rains, look out with the floor-to-ceiling glass door, the craggy concrete edges and corners of the door stretch out to the choppy river, and the log "waves" in the museum echo with the real waves outside the window, and nature and architecture really have a sense of seamless integration.
The new museum of more than 8,000 square meters is divided into two floors, about 20 meters high from floor to ceiling, so open that there is almost no sense of restraint in the building. The first floor is home to the café and shop, and the second floor is home to two exhibition halls: the permanent Scottish Design Gallery and the Edmondson Gallery, which changes two or three times a year. There is also a library of design books and a studio for artists-in-residence. The first artist-in-residence was Simon Mick, a video game designer from Glasgow, who stayed on campus for one year, and visitors could enter the studio at any time to watch him work.
Before stepping into a Scottish Design Gallery, it's a good idea to learn about the history of Scottish design. Since England negotiated the Signing of the United Treaty with Scotland in 1707, giving birth to the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scottish designers flourished in and around England throughout the 18th century. To this day, the economic benefits of Scottish design, such as the Paisley shawl, tartan and tweed, as well as the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde River and the art and design of Glasgow, still occupy the core of Scotland's economic income.
"Scottish Design" gallery.
Walking into the Scottish Design Gallery is like falling into the corridor of time. For example, the Fair Island jacquard sweater woven by the northern Islanders of Scotland has become a classic because Edward VIII often wore it to play golf in St Andrews in the 1920s, and is still a favorite style of designers from all walks of life. Another example is the Wellington boots, which are popular among decorators today, made of 28 pieces of rubber material, excellent waterproofness, and their patents can be traced back a century. There is also the steel bridge that scots are proud of today, the Forth Bridge, which is the pioneer of similar bridges in the United Kingdom, with a total span of more than 2,000 meters, shortening the journey between London and Aberdeen by 9 hours, and is known as a Victorian engineering miracle. Previously collected by the V&A Museum in London, the works on display here range from architecture to fashion, from medical to furniture to video game design.
But for me, the most chic thing is not the exhibits, but the exhibition hall itself, which exudes a sense of theater atmosphere. It turns out that this space carrier of various "Made in Scotland" is itself a restored version of the tea room of the 1908 Scottish artist and design master Mackintosh's masterpiece "Oak House"!
In the early 1970s, the "Oak House" tea room, which represented the avant-garde aesthetic of Scottish art deco and contributed to the fashion lifestyle of Glasgow for more than half a century, was demolished, leaving the Scottish contemporary art scene in the throat.
In fact, 15 years ago, the Glasgow Museum was interested in reorganizing the Oak House. In 2014, the library of the Glasgow School of Art, the only remaining masterpiece of Macintosh's design, was destroyed by fire, and those who felt that it was urgent to save the "Oak House". Artists raised £200,000 in art funds, and Alison Brown led a team to restore the "Oak House" one by one as it was.
Thanks to the ingenious design of lighting and glass by the master artist Mackintosh, the exhibition hall itself has a theatrical atmosphere.
Entering the house, the blue enamel stained glass windows are permeated with fantasy lights, and Mackintosh's signature repetitive vertical lines create a unique spatial rhythm. Contrasted with dark oak is a pink glass cover and blown glass in the form of lime teardrops. From today's point of view, this fantasy forest, which was born a century ago, is still not outdated, even if it is no longer pioneering.
This makes people think about the "zeitgeist" in artistic creation. The "zeitgeist" never seems to have been the key to Macintosh's artistic creation—he took a step or even a few steps more than his time—but his work still occupies the aesthetic high ground today, a hundred years later. To date, there is no artist in Scotland who is more representative of the "zeitgeist" than him.