In search of Utopia: London Design Biennale

One of the peculiar things about biennales is that they tend to be held in cities that are not global centres of art production or trade. They are a kind of intellectual counterpoint to commerce. Venice might have been big in art and architecture four centuries ago, but now, not so much. Kassel, home to the five-yearly modern and contemporary art exhibition Documenta, is hardly an international art hub. You could say the same about such biennale cities as Gwangju, Sharjah and Lyon. São Paulo is a centre of production — but only more recently has it become part of a global circuit.

Yet London is about to launch its inaugural Design Biennale. And London is, we are told by a succession of spokespeople on a podium, the global centre for design. The launch came in the same week as the Royal College of Art was confirmed as the world’s top design school in the QS University rankings. And in the same week came the announcement of the opening date for the new Design Museum in Kensington, west London, an £83m conversion of the concrete shell of the former Commonwealth Institute.

A week earlier, outline plans had been revealed for the new branch of the V&A in east London’s Olympicopolis, another blockbuster institution for displaying and thinking about design. This is hardly a city that lacks an infrastructure of design culture.

So what is this new biennale for, and does a city that prides itself (occasionally too smugly) on its status as a design capital, really need it? In fact, what is a design biennale?

“What it is not,” says the Biennale’s director Christopher Turner, “is a trade show.” It’s good that he clarifies this because it is being organised by John Sorrell and Ben Evans, founder and director of the London Design Festival. The LDF has spread across the city in the years since its first incarnation in 2003, hoovering up emerging districts and destinations under its expansive umbrella. It has been a huge success but at its heart is, effectively, a series of trade shows — albeit sophisticated and self-aware versions of the genre.

“The LDF has been such a success,” Sorrell says, “that it has generated over 100 copies around the world. But the model here is more like the Venice Art Biennale. It’s about the layering of other things, not just installations but the talks, education, the conversations that take place around it.”

The theme of the inaugural festival is “Utopia”, a nod to the 500th anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More’s book. It is, presumably, deliberately vague — after all, aren’t all designers utopian by nature? Are they not projecting ideas into a speculative future to make it better?

Turner quotes the urbanist Lewis Mumford, who said that “The first utopia was the city itself”, and relates the idea to envisaging London as both platform and subject. “More’s fictional island of Utopia (which means ‘no place’) is entirely man-made,” Turner says. “It’s a triumph of design and technology which contributes to an apparent happiness of its population.”

“Many utopias, and dystopias,” he continues, “rely on the transformative power of technology for their plots. These fictions are where futuristic designs and ideas can be trialled.”

What Venice has done so magically in its biennales is to animate a city which was once the pinnacle of architectural and engineering achievement, but which has since faded into exquisite irrelevance, and make it a venue for discussion of possible futures. The architecture biennale is about cities that might have been, as well as about cities that could still be.

Twenty years ago this idea might have been difficult to sell. But now cities know that design is everything

The London setting, Somerset House, is perhaps as close to the grand vision of Venice as the city has. Canaletto painted the panorama of the burgeoning 18th-century city from its terrace. Its basement arch is a Piranesian construction that once admitted the residents by gilded barge directly from the Thames. The London Biennale will take over the whole of the building, from its dark, evocative basements to its vast courtyard and riverside terraces, affording a range of atmospheres and scales of intimacy and spectacle. But if a design biennale is to avoid becoming a trade fair, its content must eschew the commercial production on which the industry relies.

“Twenty years ago,” says Sorrell, “this idea might have been difficult to sell. But now cities know that design is everything; fashion, architecture, product . . . I want to see games here too, graphics, we want to have conversations about population movement and security, about the big issues.”

That’s fine, I suggest, but with the new Design Museum opening in Kensington this summer, the new wing of Tate Modern also embracing design and the V&A’s planned expansion to Olympicopolis, is there really a need for another design showcase?

“Both the V&A and the Design Museum want to be part of it,” Turner replies. “But this biennale will be about ideas [more than objects]. It will be a challenging look at design from a global perspective. We also have this incredibly central location and I think we’ll get a much younger demographic.”

Turner’s background is in editing (Modern Painters and ICON magazines) and writing. Because he is perhaps less ensconced in the culture of commercial design than other curators, his scope for the Biennale has been more eclectic and, perhaps, more ambitious. With 34 nations and some of the world’s biggest design institutions, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (US), the MAK (Austria), the Moscow Design Museum, the V&A and the India Design Forum, there are some intriguing propositions from across six continents.

The Moscow Design Museum will bring lost Soviet blueprints from their archives, Lebanon will be attempting to recreate a slice of Beirut street life and Germany will be creating an installation looking at the psychological roots of utopia. Among the most intriguing-sounding contributions, Chile will be making a reconstruction of the Cybersyn Operations Room, a high-tech and sinister tool developed by Salvador Allende’s regime and designed by British operations research scientist Stafford Beer as a control room for the economy. There will be a project from Palestine by the provocative and intelligent Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti focusing on the ubiquitous tent of the refugee camps. Plans also include an installation by Barber Osgerby, designers of the 2012 Olympic Torch.

As Sorrell says, design has diversified. It now touches on innumerable aspects of contemporary culture and business, yet its reputation still hinges on product and, ultimately, consumption. If the exhibits at Somerset House can succeed in pushing ideas and speculation rather than objects to a wider audience, it will be setting out an intriguing template. It could catalyse a shift in the perception of design from a commercial to a fundamentally cultural pursuit.

londondesignbiennale.com

Photographs: Gui Bonsiepe; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Fernando Romero Enterprise