Scottish by nature, Scottish by design - the nation’s best works

FROM today until August, the V&A museum, to coincide with the upcoming Olympics, showcases the best of British design and creativity in the years from 1948 – when London hosted “The Austerity Games” – to the summer of 2012. One of the curators, Christopher Breward, is now principal of Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), but for eight years he was the head of research at the V&A. He says: “The exhibition was an idea of Mark Jones, who was director of the National Museums of Scotland, and from 2001 until 2010, the director of the V&A. He felt nobody had ever done a really good survey of the best of British design. The V&A doesn’t even have a permanent gallery of modern British design, the galleries stop in 1900, so this is almost a tester for what you might do.”

Martin Roth, the V&A’s current director, writes in his introduction to the accompanying book: “The exhibition traces how artists and designers have responded to a rapidly changing world. [It] encompasses everything from the ambition of grand state projects to the vibrancy of the nation’s popular culture. Importantly, the exhibition helps trace the development of Britain’s dynamic creative economy.”

In his office on Lauriston Place, Breward says: “We wanted to tell a story, of what changed in British design over 60 years. The first gallery is all about the tension in British design between modernism and a sense of tradition and heritage.”

Modernism was an aesthetic movement that favoured innovative over traditional forms of expression on the grounds that they were more appropriate to their time. It was often associated with an idealised vision of humanity and society.

“Modernism was forced on the British, in a sense,” says Breward. “It’s associated with the continent and America. The British have always been a bit resistant to that ‘foreign’ stuff. It’s all a bit severe. What you get in Britain in the post-war era is a tempered, almost decorative, modernism. Look at the kind of designs promoted at the Festival of Britain: they have a light, airy, decorative quality. It’s not that hard modernism, though we do have examples of brutalism, in the 1970s, such as the National Theatre and other iconic buildings that were hated at the time but which were important. The exhibition offers a lot of room for debate about what’s good design, what’s bad design, and what’s British about it. We tried to play those things off together – so we have the Festival of Britain next to the Coronation, two great events that happened around the same time but which represent completely different aspects of British culture and identity.”

There’s a section devoted to the British art school, which is vitally important, says Breward, to the development of street style. “It’s about subversion, about fashion, graphics, music, all those things Britain is famous for around the world, from the swinging sixties through punk to contemporary street style and music culture.”

In the 19th and early 20th century, he explains, art schools were traditional places producing competent designers and artists, many of whom went on to work in industry – painting on ceramics, or designing textiles, for example. “That changed in the 1960s with the democratisation of education, for a start. Art schools upped their game and became more challenging and, in 1968, a lot of art colleges were where the students revolted first, wanting change and courses that were relevant. They wanted art and design to challenge society, not simply to serve it. You see an explosion of creativity.”

The final gallery’s offering is focused on technology and innovation, and the traditional idea that Britain is a nation of inventors and engineers. “What happens when you stop being a nation that makes things, like ships, cotton, and machines, to becoming a nation that makes ideas or things for the new society that we live in? Or does something virtual? That’s the big story.”

Well, what is British about British design? “One answer is that British design is not about conformity. The great thing we discovered, and this is where the art school is important, in the way that it’s trained designers for the past 60 years, is that it encourages the culture of individuality, and going for the best thing, but doesn’t present a big set of rules. That’s one of the reasons why modernism didn’t really succeed in Britain. In their quiet way, the British like to challenge those sets of rules, and that comes through in our design.”

PROFILE: THE BEST OF SCOTLAND’S DESIGN FEATS

SIR EDUARDO PAOLOZZI

BORN in Edinburgh in 1924, Paolozzi died in 2005. The exhibition features his sculpture, on loan from the Scottish National Gallery, Diana as an Engine. But perhaps more importantly, it contains a portion of The Krazy Kat Arkive of Twentieth Century Popular Culture, which consists of 20,000 or so files and objects collected by the artist and acquired by the V&A in 1985, then added to by Paolozzi in subsequent years. Paolozzi collected what others discarded, including American science-fiction comic books, plastic toys, pictures of weapons, colour-saturated pictures of food, magazines, puzzles, games, souvenirs, and much more.

Breward says: “Paolozzi’s émigré background is important. He had a difficult war – his grandfather, father and uncle were killed while being transported to Canada as enemy aliens, and Eduardo was detained in Saughton prison. He found refuge in this collecting, and these are items that wouldn’t have survived if not for him, so the collection is important to popular culture itself. Through his work he opened up British artists and designers to the American idea of pop art, that celebrated fast cars, buxom pin-ups, and fast food. He brought that iconography over to British design culture.”

FALKIRK WHEEL

PART of The Millennium Link, it connects the Forth and Clyde Canal to the Union Canal, which is 35m (115ft) higher. Formerly, they were joined by a series of 11 locks over a distance of 1.5 km, which were dismantled in 1933. It is the world’s first and only rotating boat lift, conceived by British Waterways along with a design team that included Scotland-based RMJM architects.

The wheel: is 35m tall, cost £17.5 million to build, consists of 1,200 tonnes of steel, and contains more than 45,000 bolt holes. The gondolas hold 500,000 litres of water, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool, but it only uses 1.5KWh of energy to turn – the same amount needed to boil eight kettles.

Breward says: “It’s very elegant, very beautiful, very slick. From a distance it looks like a piece of landscape art, an installation. I think it picked up on the Scottish sense of the great engineers, many of whom came from Scotland. It’s a modern iteration of the background tradition of the visionary engineer, and there’s nothing else like it.”

TWEED

THE exhibition contains a Hardy Amies suit, from 1970, of mohair tweed designed by Bernat Klein, an émigré from Serbia who based himself in Scotland’s tweed industry, where he created great modernist textiles. Breward says: “It’s full of the greens and blues closely related to the landscape. We’ve also backed the showcase with a selection of tweeds that make a Highland landscape, and found a yarn artist who produces tweed trophy heads. There is a Vivienne Westwood ensemble from her On Liberty collection of 1994, made of bright red and blue Harris tweed and tartan. It has a bustle, and a hunting jacket and a big fur hat. It was when she was at her most operatic. It’s a celebration of the garden and the rural landscape. If you look at British textiles, a lot are florals or, like Klein’s tweeds, pick up the colours and textures of British landscapes.”

COMPUTER GAMES

SCOTLAND is world renowned for computer game design and is home to 25 per cent of the UK’s video games industry, which contributes an estimated £30 million to Britain’s economy, and around 1,500 jobs. Grand Theft Auto, from Edinburgh-based Rockstar North, is one of the most famous – and notorious – games, with sales of around 125 million copies worldwide.

“We’ve commissioned an installation covering the history of British computer games,” says Breward. “Many of the companies are based in Edinburgh or Dundee. It’s a reflection of the post-industrial reinvention of cities. Where heavy industry has gone away, often you have a new sense of creativity coming through, inhabiting these new spaces. I think it’s a reflection on the brilliance of the Scottish art school system. Duncan of Jordanstone, in particular, has been at the forefront of innovation and video gaming possibilities, along with the animation department at Edinburgh College of Art, and in Glasgow, as well.”

The gaming pavilion offers an immersive experience, aiming to make visitors feel as if they are within the virtual world – passing from the early game Lemmings, also from Rockstar North, past Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto.

Breward says: “You look through a slit out to the landscape of the Grand Theft Auto city as it changes, and then you move through to LittleBigPlanet. It’ll be a very lively, slightly spooky experience, like walking through a haunted house. This is about the design of the game, the look of the game, how they might feel particular as a sort of British sensibility, with a slight jokiness or kookiness to them.”

SIR BASIL SPENCE

Born in 1907 in Bombay, he died in 1976. The award-winning architect was, aged 12, educated at George Watson’s, before going to ECA. “He is my absolute hero,” says Breward, delighted to be working at Spence’s alma mater, with proximity to early Spence designs, such as the garage on Causewayside that is now home to Majestic Wine.

“The exhibition has a big section on Coventry Cathedral, his masterpiece. I have never been so moved by a building before. I’m not a religious man, but you’ve got Spence’s beautiful decorative modernism on the one side, and the bombed shell of the old cathedral on the other, so it says everything about reconstruction, a new Britain and a sense of hope. It is a beautiful building that’s coming back into fashion. It’s sort of 50s modernist chic, if you like. Spence was the quintessential, urbane Edinburgh architect; hyperintelligent and had a big, twirly moustache. He epitomises the figure of the Edinburgh architect working in London, and is one of the most influential architects of his generation.”