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Fresh designs on a modern monument
Rowan Moore, Architecture Critic16.12.08
The building that used to house the Commonwealth Institute is a 1960s Millennium Dome. It is a monument to a fuzzy idea, which hoped to achieve through construction an image of confidence and certainty which the clients didn't have themselves. Like the Dome, it tried to look dynamic and modern, with thrusting buttresses and a parabolic roof, also tent-like, as if it sat lightly on the earth and could as easily be taken up and transported somewhere else.
As with the Dome, image was tripped up by reality. Its content - a series of exhibits about Commonwealth countries - struggled to interest people. The Commonwealth is itself a compromise, a palliative for loss of empire with some capacity for benign influence, so to create an institute about a compromise is to wrap something woolly in yet more wool. No amount of architecture can disguise this fact.
The supposed lightness and flexibility of the structure turned out to be an illusion, and, as with the Dome, finding a new use has not been easy. The original purpose of the Institute building was doomed when Britain joined what is now the European Union - an act which reduced the importance of the Commonwealth and made its countries less inclined to contribute to the Institute - and the exhibition space eventually closed as a permanent display when the exhibits were removed in 1996. Despite 15 studies and proposals since 1987, it remains forlorn and stubbornly empty, marooned at the southern end of Holland Park like some relic of a long-abandoned space programme. It occupies some intensely desirable real estate but is inert and valueless.
Yet it cannot be demolished lightly. It is a listed building, and rightly so. Designed by Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall and Partners, the practice which had led the design of the Royal Festival Hall, it is a development of the Festival of Britain's spirit of playful modernity. It is no masterpiece, as cost-cutting led the simple idea of an oversailing roof to be bodged and compromised, and there are better modern buildings that English Heritage has failed to protect. But there are also many Victorian buildings much less ambitious and distinctive that are listed.
It also represents a moment in time. In South Kensington there is the 19th-century tower of the Imperial Institute, the Commonwealth Institute's predecessor, an even more useless structure. There is no question of destroying the tower, which is an emblem of its period, nor should there be of the tent.
The Dome was eventually rescued by becoming the O2. The Institute building's equivalent may conceivably, at last, be about to arrive in the form of the developer Chelsfield, which now owns it, and the Design Museum, which may relocate into the tent from Shad Thames. The Design Museum has been casting about for larger, better located sites for some time, and has flirted with moving next to Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum or City Hall.
The Commonwealth Institute site looks like its best bet yet. Chelsfield hopes to make a profit out of building flats around the tent, a chunk of which will go to the Design Museum. As Chelsfield is unlikely to win planning permission for its flats without a plausible public use for the tent, each party needs the other. Plans have now been revealed, with a view to putting in a planning application early next year.
The architect is the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Rotterdam-based practice led by Rem Koolhaas, one of the most celebrated architects in the world. Koolhaas's works include the monumental, nearly complete Beijing headquarters for China Central Television, a vertical oblong doughnut whose huge overhanging top seems eternally perched on the edge of constructional calamity.
Anyone expecting something as spectacular on the Commonwealth Institute site will be disappointed. Koolhaas's fame, in part, rests on his ability to surprise people, and his latest manoeuvre is to rebel against his own celebrity. His office is now exploring the idea of designing "ordinary" architecture. It has also found, in London, that it helps not to be too assertive.
"We find it very ironic working in London," says Reinier de Graaf, the OMA partner responsible for the Commonwealth Institute site, "because they hire famous architects who then have to apply all their talents to being invisible. You are allowed to have modern architecture, except it can't be seen."
OMA has already designed one low-key project here, the planned new headquarters for NM Rothschild in the City.
On the Commonwealth Institute site, it is allowing the original wonky tent to remain the most striking building, while making some deft adjustments to its interior to enable its conversion into the new Design Museum. It has simplified it, while enhancing its best feature, which is the sense of space under the curves and billows of the roof. It is proposing to let in daylight to what was previously a black box.
OMA wants to demolish the long oblong administration building alongside the tent, which is part of the original design but in itself is nothing special. In its place it wants to build three blocks of flats, from which will come the money to fund the whole project, as well as some profit for Chelsfield. The space around the blocks will be landscaped to create a sense that they are pavilions standing in a continuation of Holland Park.
The blocks will have simple shapes and regular gridded façades, albeit enlivened by patterned ceramic tiles and by projecting and receding balconies. Rising to nine storeys, they will not exactly be what de Graaf calls "invisible" but they are sited so as to reduce their impact on the adjoining street and park. Like the tent, they are aligned at 45 degrees to surrounding buildings.
Much will depend on the execution. Ordinary can easily become prosaic, and the flats could become the dumb blocks they almost resemble. The details of the tiles, and precise decisions about siting and landscape, will make the difference between subtle and banal. But the instinct to keep things simple, and to allow the 1960s building a monopoly on weirdness, is intelligent.
The history of the Commonwealth Institute's building has proceeded crabwise, rarely rationally, always with a mismatch of hope and achievement.
The original concept was misguided, the building interesting but flawed, and the decision to keep it, in purely economic terms, is perverse. Yet this series of wonky decisions could lead to the creation of an intriguing corner of Kensington. Without them, there would probably be just another run-of-the-mill block of flats.
Reader views (9)
I was the one who squatted the building to force its sale, that's what the whole thing was about!!!!!!!!!! giving the money back to the commonwealth institute as they always wanted to sell it but K&C council refused to delist the building....now, building sold=lots of money for the education of kids in all these poor commonwealth countries....and, no we are not there but we plan to get an embassy next..ahhahahahahha!!!!!!!!!
- Dom, LONDON
The developers seem to win all the time, the lovely Odean cinema will be demolished to make way for an apartment building, so is a watch on watch apartment building looming in the not too distant future in place of the Commonwealth Institute, how far do they go, its a listed building and should be protected, I live in Kensington, are you telling me that they can knock the house down next door as to their desire and only for MONEY, thats what it boils down to..MONEY, the next project will be the Royal Albert Hall, maybe not enough tickets..Kensington is what it is and that includes the Commonwealth Institute even though its closed down at present, it should be resurrected as to what us the people want and not some government lag who says different policies now apply, Hello, are not now a listed building all of a sudden. How does that work????
Would appreciate your call on this
I would love comments
- Caroline Pesaran, Kensington. London.
A sad day it was when the institute closed it's doors. To myself and other children growing up in inner city London and indeed as young adults , it presented a warm inviting educational experience and insight into other cultures and far away lands. I have grown and now have worked and lived in some of the countries represented there ,I can say the institute provided an accurate representation of the feel and flavour of countries in it's exhibits. As a child who wanted to travel and explore the world the institue gave me inpsiration and motivation feeding a hunger to travel. It is a loss and was a credit to this country and should have been preserved, some things can never be recreated and the unique style of the institute is one of those special places which has been lost forever, what a shame.
- Sean Calvin, London
What Mr Marsden would like is to turn Holland Park into a high rise housing estate. Well with the new developments that is very close to what it will be. Thank goodness most Londoners do not share his sad and cynical views.
- Richard, London
I agree with Callum that the experience of visiting the Commonwealth Institute as a school pupil was wonderful. I first went there in the 60s and returned many times. As an exhibition space it had so much more to offer than the fusty, overly academic museums of the day. They have since caught up in terms of presentation but you have to admire what the Institute achieved it its heydey. It was a three-dimensional geography, history and economics lesson which I'm sure will have had a lasting impression on many children and students (let alone future museum designers).
Phil, London
- Phil Cooper, London, UK
Richard, enough of the hysteria please! 100ft buildings 'dominating' Holland Park! Hilarious. Why not just look at the grass and trees instead if you are that horrified by the sight of a building existing in London; which let me remind you is one of the Worlds major cities. However, isn't it strange as you of course think it is perfectly fine to see large Victorian structures at the edge of a park? We build slightly taller now because we can and because we need to. Leave us all in peace and with at least some prospect of a bit of decent humane living space.
- B Marsden, London, UK
The Commonwealth is - not was- a noble vision; the Design Museum is yet another trendy entertainment spot, essentially vacuous, being more about styling than real design. This country's retreat from one of its grandest ideas symbolised our abdication from greatness. When South Africa regained its freedom after Apartheid, the first thing it did was rejoin the Commonwealth. Mozambique joined too, being surrounded by C'wealth states, although never ruled by Britain, which is why you see the Mozambican High Commissioner at the Cenotaph every year. Other nations understand the significance of this idea -nations peacefully united by common ideals - but we apparently do not, so we joined a union of nations ruled by a common bureaucracy. A poor trade.
- Mdj, Leyton, e10 london
I think you're being far too harsh on the Commonwealth Insitute - I remember going there for a school trip in the '80s and loving it. I don't think there was anything with the basic concept of what it displayed, but perhaps it just needed rebranding. If the reports of the Museum of Empire coming to London are true, it shows there will always be an interest in our country's past, right or wrong.
I also wish someone in the media would be interesting enough to deviate from the standard line that the Millennium Dome was rubbish. I loved it! I had a great day out there, and thought it fulfilled its purpose fantastically well, and it's now a fantastic gig venue. It was only ever meant to run for one year as the Dome, so why can't we admit that overall, it's been a great success and ultimately, a triumph of ambition?
BTW surprised there was no mention in this article about the fact that squatters took over the Commonwealth Institute since it closed. Are they still there?
- Callum, London
The flats are planned to be over 100 feet in height and will dominate large parts of Holland Park. Together with the flats that Kensington and Chelsea Council plan to build on the Holland Park School playing fields, this will be a major disaster for one of London's most beautiful parks. Don't be fooled by all this talk of the Design Museum, it is just another example of greed triumphing over preserving the environmemt. Our new Mayor of London promised to stop all this, instead of which he is hard at work helping his Tory friends make more money.
- Richard, London
