As I arrive at Brown’s hotel, an expensive and chic spot just off Piccadilly in London’s Mayfair, Deyan Sudjic is sat at the bar, sipping a Martini, his trademark floppy fringe hanging down as he leafs through a book. Sudjic, who is the chair of the first Forum AID Prize jury, has just taken up his position as director of London’s Design Museum, the latest stage of a career that has taken him from London to Glasgow, Milan, Venice and across the world as a journalist, critic and curator. Sudjic was born and grew up in Acton, west London, of Serbian parentage, and there is a sense of a homecoming about him taking the reins of London’s premier cultural institution dedicated to design. Sudjic looks at home here, amongst the well-heeled tourists who make up the clientele of the bar we meet in to conduct the interview.

Sudjic is a somewhat enigmatic presence in the architecture and design scene in the UK. Despite being a high-profile critic, he retains a certain mystique, and there is an air of remoteness about him, despite his writerly eloquence. He undoubtedly has one of the most impressive CVs in architecture and design culture. He trained as an architect in Edinburgh, Scotland, before becoming a writer and editor with architecture magazines such as Building Design and the Architectural Review. He burst to broader attention as the launch editor of Blueprint magazine in 1983, and ran it for a decade, documenting the emergence of a generation of UK architects and designers who now dominate the British and international scenes. After he left the magazine that made his name, he directed the Glasgow City of Architecture and Design festival in 1999, and shortly afterwards was made editor of legendary Italian magazine Domus. During his three-year tenure in Milan, he also found time to curate the Venice Biennale of architecture in 2002, and write a weekly column as architecture critic for the Observer newspaper. More recently, he has been dean of the architecture school at Kingston University in southwest London, and was offered the job of director of the Design Museum in March, finally taking up the post in September.

Contemporaries and acquaintances describe him as intelligent, standoffish and ambitious, and he has a gentle voice that belies his sometimes combative style. In a rare autobiographical piece, published in the Observer this year, he wrote of how his own cultural provenance, as the son of immigrant parents, and “the recognition of the precariousness of my parents’ lives at my mother’s funeral made me realise for the first time how their experiences have coloured my own professional preoccupation with understanding how buildings and daily objects shape our sense of who we are … How identity is manufactured has always interested me.” Perhaps it is this search for his own identity that makes his manner sometimes non-committal. In any case, to interview him is to feel oneself be interviewed, his journalistic instincts often prompting him to turn questions on the questioner. We sat down for an hour over another Martini to talk about his career, and the architecture and design scene that he will now document and exhibit in his new position.

Perhaps it would be best to start off by talking through your biography a little. I’m going to turn this into an edited transcript in the end...
I’ve always hated all that transcript stuff. And all this will go straight into the interview, I hope. We’re deconstructing the interview as we speak.

We’re already being terribly arch about the whole thing.
Yes, well this is the school of Obrist [curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a prolific interviewer] journalism.

Tell me a bit about how Blueprint started.
I trained as an architect and emerged from university at a time when there wasn’t much work for architects. And I’d also had a parallel obsession with writing, and when I was a student I got involved with running the university newspaper. Strangely enough our news editor for a little while was [British chancellor of the exchequer] Gordon Brown.

I suppose I’d always had a patience problem. Architecture does require immense amounts of patience, whereas writing was an instant reward, a sugar rush, You’re in print the month, the week, the day that you’ve written something. So I initially thought that I would spend a brief interlude as a writer before returning to a mediocre career as an architect. But once you start [writing], it’s very hard to go back.

Later I had the sense, with Peter Murray, that we should look at doing a magazine a different way. Which is how Blueprint happened. I suppose it was initially motivated by an aspiration to make a magazine that didn’t have advertisements in the middle of every page. We were also very influenced by a paper in America called Skyline [published by Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in the late 70s and early 80s].

But I suppose in the back of my mind was always Domus, which was so impressive in that it actually managed to make architecture and design and art part of the same conversation.

But Domus and the Italian magazines were generally based around a charismatic leader who was a major cultural figure. While you and Peter were known, you wouldn’t have been in that category then.
No we were whippersnappers, but when Ponti started Domus, nobody knew who he was. Not that I’m comparing myself to Gio Ponti at all. But the difference with Italian publishing about architecture is that in Italy, a magazine is associated with the position you take as a major figure in architecture, so Domus had editors like Mario Bellini, Alessandro Mendini, Gio Ponti, and there was always that sense that it was a position taken by someone who is in practice. I suppose my experience editing Domus many years later was actually a collision between the Anglo-Saxon idea of editors running magazines, and [the Italian idea of] architects running magazines.

Tell me about the moment in design and architecture that Blueprint appeared in and was part of.
It was 1983, which I guess was a kind of Dark Ages. Even allowing for the passing of time and shifting judgements, I would say that it was not a good time for architecture in Britain. And there was a sense of a generation wanting to come out, and most magazines begin like that. They are based on relationships with younger architects and designers, who make their careers by trashing the last generation, and make a kind of new reality. I suppose that’s what Blueprint was.

Read the whole article in the magazine, no 4.06.

Text: Kieran Long
Photo: Johan Ödmann

Footnote: Besides Deyan Sudjic, who is the chairman of the jury for the Forum AID Prize, Ellen van Loon, Johanna Grawunder and Patricia Urquiola become part of the jury. Read more about the jury under "News" in the menue.