The Royal College Of Art's Dyson Building Opens Uniting Fine Art Disciplines For The First Time in 175 Years

A throng of art and design mavens, including Orla Kiely, Vicki Conran and Priscilla Carluccio, business experts, academics, students and staff perused the building, its public exhibition gallery, 220-seat lecture theatre and main printmaking hall with lithograph stones, a 150-year-old, one-tonne etching press, and historic, traditional printing presses.

Guests also got a first glimpse of the College’s new signage by consultancy Cartlidge Levene. The signage, which features the specially created Calvert Brody font by three generations of RCA type design luminaries; Margaret Calvert, Neville Brody and Henrik Kubel; will be used across the entire College by 2015.

InnovationRCA, the College’s entrepreneur business incubator, which now has a dedicated, purpose-built home at the Dyson building in Battersea, showcased its most successful ventures in the Innovate show in the new public exhibition gallery. It is ‘the perfect shop window to present ideas’, according to Rector Paul Thompson.

A 300-strong crowd gathered in the Wolfson Printmaking Hall for toasts and speeches, and to see RCA alumnus and design engineering entrepreneur Sir James Dyson inaugurate the building, turning the wheel of the 1829 printing press on a rare Sir Peter Blake etching.

Rector Paul Thompson told the audience: ‘Finally after 175 years we have a campus that mirrors the way artists practice, moving between media and materials.'

He added: ‘What is so clever is the way in which [architect] Haworth Tompkins has mirrored our educational aspirations. They have created vistas, walkways and cut-throughs that allow all the building’s very different occupants to interact in true RCA interdisciplinary style.'

Sir James Dyson added that successive governments had failed to grasp the ‘strategic importance’ of art and design, but that the RCA’s first-class creativity was ‘transforming’ the UK’s share of world trade.

‘Successive governments think that art and design is rather a nice thing to have. I think they’re completely missing the strategic importance of art and design. World consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated with the internet. Every country can make almost anything. And so, world consumers want the best in art and design. Second best won’t do any longer.’

He added: ‘RCA graduates can really transform Britain’s share of world trade with their creative minds. They already are doing that. After all, I owe everything to the Royal College of Art. It taught me to design, to grow up. It taught me to challenge experts.'

In addition to the £5 million gift from the James Dyson Foundation, the new building has also received generous support from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation and the Wolfson Foundation.

The Dyson development is a significant shift in the College’s estate. By the time the next phase of the College’s £61 million masterplan will complete in 2015, more than half of the expected 1,500 students will be housed in Battersea.