London's Design Museum has announced that its new John Pawson-designed home in the former Commonwealth Institute will open on 24 November 2016 ? two years later than originally planned.
The Design Museum, which currently occupies a former 1940s banana warehouse in Shad Thames, will relocate to the renovated building, located on Kensington High Street in west London.
The new site is just a stone's throw away from the Royal College of Art, the V&A museum, the Science Museum and the Serpentine Galleries.
John Pawson's conversion of the 1960s building will triple the museum's current exhibition spaces to almost 10,000 square metres, allowing the museum to accommodate the first permanent display of its collection, alongside two temporary exhibitions. It is hoped the move will bring in an extra 400,000 visitors each year. Rendering showing a gallery in the building's new John Pawson-designed interior
"We need to do something like what Tate Modern did for contemporary art for design in this country," said museum director Deyan Sudjic at today's press conference at Phillips auction house.
"Before Tate was built there was a sense that contemporary art was somehow at the periphery of things, something that even seems not relevant to the mainstream of British life. It's changed so much. We can do that with design as well."
Pawson's plans for the £83 million transformation of the Grade II* listed building were first unveiled in 2012 and schedul...