The £80m V&A Museum Of Design Dundee on the banks of the Tay, housed in a dazzling building inspired by cliffs on the east coast of Scotland, is to open in September.
Details were announced on Thursday for what will be the V&A’s first outpost outside London, and Scotland’s first design museum. Chief among those was the opening date of 15 September, revealed by the gallery’s director, Philip Long, who said he was thrilled.
“In just eight months we will be opening the doors and welcoming our first visitors. V&A Dundee is set to be a vital new cultural organisation for Dundee, the UK and beyond, helping to change understanding of just how important design and creativity are to people’s lives,” he said.
“We are enormously grateful to all our supporters for helping to make this happen.”
The building, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, is unquestionably a new landmark for the city, similar in wow factor to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, northern Spain, designed by Frank Gehry.
From some angles it looks like the prow of a ship about to enter the water. Kuma has talked about wanting to create a “living room for the city” with a building resembling a Scottish cliff face.
The V&A said there would be about 300 exhibits in free-to-enter galleries telling the story of Scotland’s design heritage.
At the museum’s centre will be the 13.5-metre-long oak panelled room, which Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tea rooms in Glasgow in 1907. The panels were salvaged in the 1970s and have largely been in storage since then.
Other objects will include original Beano artworks from the Dundee publisher DC Thomson and a 15th-century Book of Hours.
The temporary opening exhibition will be Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which will travel to London and open in two weeks.
The V&A said the Turner prize-nominated artist Ciara Phillips had been commissioned to make a work in response to the collections. It would be seen by visitors as they reached the top floor of the museum, before entering the galleries.
Tristram Hunt, the V&A’s director, said the new museum was a cultural milestone for Dundee “and a new opportunity for the UK to show the world how art and design can educate and inspire”.
