Kieran Long (born 1977) is a writer, curator and currently director of ArkDes, the Swedish National Museum of Architecture and Design. From February 2024, he will take over the leadership of contemporary art museum Amos Rex in Helsinki.  Previously, Long was a journalist, broadcaster, teacher in London, and spent time as deputy editor of Icon magazine and editor in chief of the Architects’ Journal and the Architectural Review. In 2012, he was appointed senior curator and a year later as the Keeper of the department of design, architecture and digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). 

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: Your background is in English literature, and you approached the architectural and design field from journalism. What started your interest in architecture (and design)? 

KIERAN LONG: There are two ways to answer that question (laugh). One is to post-rationalise – the “it was all part of a big plan” answer, which is partly true. My education was in English literature in the late 90s, which was heavily theory- and philosophy-oriented. My course was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, which, at the time, was led by figures such as Christopher Norris, Terence Hawkes and Catherine Belsey. They were extraordinary and pioneering figures in Britain’s post-structuralist theory world, and that left a strong impact. They gave me tools that made me want to be a critic, to work with the idea of the poetic imagination as something that can be understood, analysed and written about. My education gave me tools to understand an emerging sensibility in architecture after postmodernism, you could say.

But I had no professional, family, or even thematic connection with architecture. When I graduated, I moved to London, simply wanting to be a writer. It was really by luck that it was with a weekly architecture magazine, Building Design, with a talented team. My boss was Marcus Fairs, who went on to establish Dezeen, and sadly, he is not with us anymore. The era was just pre-internet, and there was still money in publishing then, with publishing houses with fairly large teams with extensive libraries. I was learning to be a writer in a unique environment that does not really exist today. I felt immediately at home there, possibly because I was trained to be  a close reader and a critic – skills I have used from day one. 

LŠ: How do you see the future of design and architecture publishing? 

KL: Looking back at my last years in publishing and print, many people thought it was all going away. And it did not happen. Many good magazines still exist in print, and people still pay for them. A subscriber model is exactly what you want, whether you are an online or a paper publication or a combination of both. It is interesting to see the magazines that survived – many of them were already independent of large-scale publishing houses, and they are still doing okay. Many new and independent print publications operate on the model of publishing two or three times a year, not as a big money-making exercise. 

Design publishing, in the English-speaking world, is in rather good shape. There are lots of exciting and innovative people working in print. The big-traffic websites in our field are less good and, I think, have been damaging for design discourse because they are so clearly just tools for PR companies. That is problematic but perhaps the end of an inevitable slide, where money has gone out of supporting journalism through advertising and towards the PR industry. The future of independent publishing to me right now looks like it ought to be more collaborative – where institutions with resources should join forces with publishing platforms that reach bigger audiences.  

LŠ: How has the editorial and journalism experience shaped your curatorial practice? Why did you decide to shift from publishing to curation?

KL: The ‘big’ shift came in 2011 when David Chipperfield asked me to go and work with him on the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012. It felt very natural as my expertise by then and contact network was in architecture. So I could help him in selecting and inviting people to make projects, developing ideas for texts and publications, and managing the relationships with contributors. 

There are different ways in which journalism influences my curatorial work. The most important project of mine that is clearly linked to that background was Rapid Response Collecting at the V&A, where I worked after the Venice Architecture Biennial. I was hired to create a new department there. To a journalist, the way that museums collect seemed strange: the approach is nearly the opposite of gathering news. Museum curators wait until history decides that an object is an integral part of design as an artform, and then they acquire the best example. That is very much still the collecting practice for institutions like the V&A. But my journalistic instincts told me that there was a need for that logic to be turned upside down. 

There were clearly objects of design that needed to be in collections now and many of them were more interesting in the present moment than they might be in 10 years time, or whenever posterity starts. That is a journalistic instinct – how is this piece of material culture telling us a story about today? But the whole initiative was about seeing events through objects of design. For example, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013, where we collected and exhibited a series of garments made at the factory to raise questions about design, supply chains, manufacturing and globalised consumerism. These dynamics had in many these context background stories, which are normally suppressed in museums. It is obviously a quite journalistic way of working and looking at the world. Such as: How is that story related to the different fields, and how can we best make and present that connection? But these days I think of it more as a question of aesthetics, even beauty. I recently read Rebecca Solnit’s lovely book about George Orwell, and in it she says: “Beauty is not only formal, it lies in the patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see.” She means that ugliness also consists of the values an object can not help but express, through the conditions of its making and its material reality. This was also part of the sensibility behind our collecting in this period, I think, especially in the context of the V&A, where artistic questions are primary.  

My colleagues and I collected many important objects in that period, such as the world’s first functioning 3D-printed handgun, which caused a minor media outcry. When we collected it, we were not interested in how scary it was that you could now take a plastic gun on an aeroplane, rather we were focussed on the artistic and ideological motivations of the guy who designed it. What tools did he use, and what was his workshop like? Who is his audience? 

What was relevant to a  museum like the V&A, which is partly a museum of manufacturing and industry, was that an emerging technology had made the gun and hundreds of other  3D-printable objects available in a new way. I describe this because I think we were working with journalistic speed but with the museum’s values. The context was new to me because I’ve never worked in a museum before, and this way of working developed naturally.

LŠ: Has setting up a new department in such a unique institution as V&A with many different units opened a debate on how museums collect and collaborate across-subjects? 

KL: I think every museum in the world is conservative on some level because their primary function is to conserve the collection, and you have to take that seriously. V&A is a more than 170-year-old institution with a specific way of operating. I had amazing support in setting up a new department – especially as somebody who is a relative novice to museum life. My mentor was the leader of the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department – Christopher Wilk, a fantastic expert. His advice helped me, but they (V&A) also saw value in a different approach – more broad and transversal than specialised in a single material or chronological period. 

My job at the V&A was making connections across emerging fields of contemporary practice. Initially, my department had only three curators and a couple of exhibition projects. Gradually, we put the team together and were lucky to attract fantastic people such as Rory Hyde, who was initially hired to be a Curator of Contemporary Architecture and Corinna Gardner, Curator of Product Design, amongst others. 

I was given a lot of freedom to create a team of talented people who achieved terrific and significant things – which is not that easy at a place like the V&A. In 2014, we realised a project that focused on new ways of working with collections and a new way of thinking about the public spaces of a museum. The exhibition was called All of This Belongs To You, and it was threaded through and integrated into galleries of the museum that were not normally used for temporary exhibitions. The principal idea was to try to ask the question:  what kind of public space is a museum? What kind of collective ownership do we have of a museum collection as citizens? The things are yours, but held in trust by this institution on your behalf. This exhibition project tried to help visitors think about collections, institutions, and public spaces, as well as the structures of commitment and care that hold them together. 

LŠ: Was your department also one of the first in the UK to focus on digital art in the museum context?

KL: Well, that is not entirely true, because the V&A has an important collection of early digital art, which goes back a long way and is part of a different department. Douglas Dodds, who was curator of that collection, made some brilliant exhibitions of early digital works using things like radar screens. My department focused on digital design, although this distinction, of course, is not easy to maintain. We commissioned many digital artworks and worked with digital artists. But we were interested in new (to the V&A) fields too – such as video games, interaction design, apps and other kinds of creativity online. The big show we made was Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt, which opened after I left in 2017. We were trying to take digital creativity seriously and bring in new fields and practitioners, and new technologies. 

The other ‘digital’ acquisition we made, which was very high profile, was the laptop from The Guardian, where their journalists stored the NSA documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden. The files were kept on this specific laptop at the Guardian’s office, and it was later destroyed by the British security services. We collected this destroyed laptop, which posed the question of who owns digital resources, what does that ownership mean? It was amazing to see how engaging with these digital fields opened up new kinds of conversations. When we acquired the laptop, I remember Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, came to the museum and spoke and suddenly, journalism and politics was in meaningful dialogue with a design and decorative arts collection. 

The V&A had previously collected many digital devices such as mobile phones and video games. But we added a political dimension: What is the agency of code? What are the political or legal  implications of a young law student who designs a 3D printed gun as a political project and releases the drawings to the world, online? 

LŠ: Since you joined ArkDes the museum has focused on shaping the DNA of the institution as a research environment – where there is a collective exchange between audience and creatives. Could we discuss how you found the museum when you joined and how you decided to mould it since your arrival? How did you engage with the local academic scene? 

KL: Joining ArkDes, I was asked to redefine the entire institution. The museum had experienced a fairly significant crisis a couple of years before my arrival. It had lost clarity in its identity and purpose. One of the difficulties the institution experienced was this mixed mission of being a national museum with a collection and an exhibition programme, combined with its rather unusual role of being a research institute in a specific area of government policy. Some people saw a potential conflict in these two roles, or were simply unsure if this somehow made us ‘less’ of a museum. 

But from my perspective, this dual role is a massive advantage. Coming from the UK, we at the V&A would have loved to have been invited in by the British government for policy discussion on housing design. ArkDes has this role explicitly, and the chance to ground the work we do about contemporary Swedish architecture and design in a rich historical and experimental understanding of these art forms.  

The research environment at ArkDes is set up to produce and commission two different kinds of research: one that contributes to the delivery of the national policy for architecture and design in Sweden, and another that feeds our museum activities. The first of those, delivered through the ArkDes Think Tank, are based around practice-based research projects that involve building prototypes on the ground in Swedish cities. Our project Street Moves is a project about the future of streets in Swedish cities, and involves complex collaborations with municipalities, designers and the public, consulting, prototyping, building and learning from those interventions. We then try to scale that work up by communicating our conclusions and engaging more municipalities in that work. Another practice-based research project is Visions in the North, a collaboration with the Council for Sustainable Cities and six northern Swedish towns, looking at strategic questions around their urban development.

The second pillar of research at ArkDes is, of course, work that we commission and do ourselves on the collection. There was no systematic collections research happening at all here when I arrived in 2017. All the research was conducted by external researchers, which is great but prevented the museum and its audiences from benefiting from that work through better exhibitions and acquisitions. 

Now, our own curators are constantly engaged with the collection, and we have established a systematic programme of visiting researchers who make research projects around themes that we generate together with them. We have presented major collections-based exhibitions and publications at ArkDes, like Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life. And we are able to benefit from the knowledge they produce for future exhibitions. We have an annual research conference where the collected knowledge is presented to a bigger audience. The idea is to build a research community around the collection, and there is no doubt that the collection has become much more high profile for international researchers since we began this work.