V&A Dundee: High Five!

Since opening its doors in September 2018, this Dundee icon has held a hat-trick of titles: the first design museum in Scotland, the first Victoria and Albert museum outside of London and the first building in the UK to be designed by Kengo Kuma. Since then, it has also been designated as a national centre for design. With much to celebrate, a special birthday event is being planned for Saturday 16 September. The museum’s Director, Leonie Bell, says: “Everyone is invited to come along and enjoy the fifth birthday celebrations. The museum will be open from 10 in the morning to 10 at night and we have a full day of free activities planned, including free entry to the Tartan exhibition, family design fun, architecture and gallery tours, live music and dance performances and the launch of our new display, Stories from the Building. The celebrations will continue outside the museum with pop-up street food and music.”

Stories from the Building is a permanent new display on the ground floor introducing visitors to the architecture, design, engineering, and construction stories behind the creation of Scotland’s design museum. As well as concept sketches, material samples and artefacts from the construction phase, the exhibition presents the original competition model for the building won by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. Interviews with the architects, project managers and engineers are accompanied by a new animation showing the development of the museum’s design and the complexity of its construction.

Live music throughout the building includes five special performances including one from Dundee’s Be Charlotte and Andrew Wasylyk who are performing together for the first time. Terra Kin, Queen of Harps and Kintra – the DJ-violin duo recently selected to play at the Radio 1 Big Weekend will add to the musical line-up.

Five curator-led tours of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room offer rare access to the upper floor of the original 1907-designed tearoom – one of Mackintosh’s most important interiors. A further five architecture tours will also run throughout the day and if that sounds a bit on the serious side, don’t worry, comic books and culinary design will intersect at Tatha Bar & Kitchen where a Desperate Dan-inspired Cow Pie with pastry horns will be unveiled (alongside Arbroath smokie, leek and Anster cheddar quiche, katsu fried chicken tacos, haggis corn dogs and Dundee cake).



Ahead of the birthday celebrations, we reflected on the varied roles and the many contributions that design makes to our culture and society and came up with our very own top 5 design projects from V&A Dundee. Happy Birthday!



• Rules of Play (2019)
An exquisite installation by Gabriella Marcella utilising a modular system of 200 identical wooden planks stained in five complementary tones as oversized building blocks that explored patterning and geometry in three-dimensional space. Through various combinations of colour, form and accumulation, the designer presented the diverse structural and rhythmic possibilities of a single unit’s repetitive use.



• Daytrippers! (2021 & 2022)
This fun and colourful project by yours truly, Local Heroes, invited a total of nine designers to create special collectable design souvenirs from beach towels to headscarves. These were toured around the museum’s plaza spaces on custom-made Christiania cargo bikes to the delight of audiences. The first Daytrippers! collection launched in 2021 and design lovers voted with their wallets making it V&A Dundee’s biggest-selling range for that year.




• Tartan (2023)
The joyful reception to this home-grown exhibition featuring more than 300 tartan objects gathered from across the globe is a testament to V&A Dundee’s development as a design museum. Billed as a radical new look at one of the world’s best-known textiles, the show has captivated audiences and critics alike from the New York Times to The Telegraph. With an inspired exhibition design and cleverly curated content, it has deservedly earned its status as the must-see show of the year.




• Talks
These play a hugely significant role in developing design discourses and V&A Dundee’s attention to topical and sometimes difficult subjects is exactly the sort of valuable and affirming content we love to see and hear. Decolonial Approaches: Materials, Pattern, Making (2023) invited Swapnaa Tamhane, Raisa Kabir and Hannah Sabapathy to explore how designers and artists are embedding decolonial approaches in their work. Together they explored the significance of the making process, the political power of pattern and material choices, and how artists and designers can reinterpret archives and objects to further the decolonisation of our collective histories. 




• V&A Dundee’s Design Market 
Curated by Tea Green Events, this takes over the museum at regular intervals offering independent designers across Scotland the opportunity to exhibit and sell high quality contemporary design. Always a heady mix of beautiful products, the market has become a key part of the design calendar for makers. The attention to the presentation and display of objects makes it a visual treat for visitors and something quite distinctive from other marketplaces.


If you’d like to contribute to the party decor at V&A Dundee, preparations for the birthday event begin the week before with a free drop-in decoration-making workshop with paper designer Kate Colin on Sunday 10 September.



---

V&A Dundee: Saturday 16 September, from 10am to 10pm,
Free drop-in family activities will run inside and outside from 11am to 4pm.
@VADundee #VADundee #weare5
@localheroesdesign #scottishdesign