The new Design Museum: Prince Charles will prefer it. But should we?

Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become a period style label. Even at the time we acknowledged the layers of irony in this historicist gesture. The Prince, sounding pained, I recall, asked, ‘Mr Bayley, why has it got a flat roof?’ And that was the end of that.

Next time it will be different. The Design Museum is moving from a creatively reused banana warehouse near Tower Bridge to a creatively reused Commonwealth Institute on the edge of Holland Park. For those inclined to see symbolism in such things, there is symbolism here. Prince Charles has not (yet) been asked to officiate at the 2015 opening ceremony, but he will surely approve of the hyperbolic paraboloid roof: a frank denial of old-fashioned rationalism.