Ben Kelly

Running alongside the 2012 Olympics, 'British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age' told the story of British fashion, furniture, fine art, graphic design, photography, ceramics, architecture and industrial products over the past 60 years. 

The studios, workspaces, factories and laboratories, the birthplaces of British design, were a key inspiration for BKD’s design approach. 

BKD created three contrasting environments to represent the shifting attitudes in British design explored in the exhibition. Punctuated by a series of monolithic walls, BKD’s scheme for the exhibition’s first gallery evoked the new colours, materials and optimism of the post-war period. In the second gallery a number of smaller spaces backing onto a set-piece of ‘the street’ were created, each with differing identities influenced by punk, fashion and photography studios of the time. In the third gallery a sterile and clean take on a factory was staged with the impression of factory north light. 

Coinciding with its 30th anniversary, Ben Kelly’s own Haçienda nightclub of 1982 was partly reconstructed as an exhibit alongside other works in the V&A’s second gallery that represent the impact of street and counter culture on British design.