Saturday 25 October 2008

Warming to a cold front

Nostalgia for the Future pt12:


To the V&A with S &R. I’m only a recent convert to the V&A, Tudor wall hangings and vases not really my thing and I’ve never seen the point at looking at clothes in glass cases. But their late night openings are nice and they have been putting on some interesting design expos lately oh and when it’s open the Casting rooms are just ace, I can’t wait for them to reopen next year they are just so wonderfully odd.

We were at the museum for the Cold War design show. It’s a varied and interesting event. Looking at how design developed in the east and west in the post war years, using lots of drawings and models and in the case of bubble cars and hifis examples of the real thing.
There are examples of commercial design but also avant garde cutting edge stuff from students and design teams with numbers instead of names (cool!).
We enjoyed the show but it was a little bitty at times and some of the themed rooms seemed a bit strained. One of the rooms that worked best for me was the space room which had a 1/3 model of a Vostock space capsule, original space suits, wacky chairs and several wonderful telecom towers (hurrah!). I would like to have seen more UK examples of cold war design to put local ideas in a global context.


I got caught taking a snap of the model of the Moscow Telecom tower at the top, I don’t really see why you can’t take pictures in galleries particularly of sculptures etc. I know the arguments about the flash effecting old paper and pigments, so no flash but aside from the odd copyright issue which is frankly nonsense in public galleries. Anyway I got one snap. Victor Keegan in the paper talks about this more.

So the show is worth a visit, the evening opening was pleasingly uncrowned, so give it a go.
The V&A gift shop did have this wonderful item of neckwear: I fear our campaign group may have to adopt them as our uniform.


On the subject of the POT is this the smuggest group on Flickr?

The only downside of the V&A is that it’s in west London and so there’s nowhere to get a drink or something to eat without a trek how does anyone live round here?

No comments: