V&A Dundee Kengo Kuma

Kengo Kuma’s architecture creates relationships, flows and circulation. The V&A Dundee acts like a gate between river and city

- Paola Nicolin

“My father was a sailor who worked in the whaling industry. My mother’s Canadian but she was born in Scotland and, after marrying, came back to work in one of the many jute mills. I married an Indian Sikh. We’re local and global. That’s Dundee. Have you seen the museum yet?” Talking to taxi drivers is a great way to feel the pulse of a city and that certainly goes for those in the Scottish city of Dundee, where the first Victoria & Albert Museum outside London opened on 15 September [this year].

The V&A Dundee is the new offshoot of the world’s leading design institution, founded in South Kensington in 1852 by tenacious designer and businessman Henry Cole. It was later named after Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, who had championed it.

Can an iconic institution devoted to creative enterprise revive the fate of a major city seriously harmed by unemployment and the postindustrial recession? Can a Scottish design collection project its rich identity and heritage globally? Will it attract visitors to discover or rediscover the genius of Christopher Dresser and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the history of tartan and Hunter boots, the carpentry of the shipbuilding industry and DC Thomson’s comic book world? How do you tell the story of a city built on trade and immigration in the Brexit era using objects?