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Stephen Paul Bayley FRIBA (born 13 October 1951) is a Welsh writer and critic, known particularly for his commentary on architecture and design. He was founding CEO of the Design Museum in London in 1989, and has been a regular architecture, art and design critic for newspapers and magazines such as The Listener , The Observer , The Spectator and Car .
Bayley was born on 13 October 1951 in Cardiff, Wales [1] and spent his childhood years in Liverpool, England, attending Quarry Bank High School for Boys. He was inspired by Liverpool's architecture and its built environment. When Bayley was 15, he wrote a letter to John Lennon, who had also attended Quarry Bank as a teenager. Bayley's description of his English teacher analysing Beatles lyrics in class helped to inspire "I Am the Walrus".[ citation needed ]
He was later educated at Manchester University and the University of Liverpool School of Architecture, [1] where his mentor was the historian and conservationist Quentin Hughes, whose obituary he wrote in The Guardian , 16 May 2004.[ citation needed ]
In the 1970s, he was a lecturer in the history of art at the University of Kent. He first became prominent as an authority on style and design when, in 1979, he began a collaboration with Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran to promote a more intelligent awareness of design. This led to the creation of The Boilerhouse Project, [2] [3] at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which became London's most successful gallery of the 1980s. The Boilerhouse Project was Britain's first permanent exhibition of design, host to more than 20 exhibitions in five years, including Ford Motor Company, Sony, Issey Miyake, Coca-Cola, and Taste. [3] The Boilerhouse evolved into a unique Design Museum of which Bayley was the founding CEO, [1] and which was opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1989. [3]
He was appointed as the creative director of the exhibition at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich.[ when? ] After a series of disputes, he resigned in 1998, citing ministerial interference. On his resignation, he said of the dome that "it could turn out to be crap", and accused government minister Peter Mandelson of "running the project like a dictator".[ citation needed ]
In 2007, Bayley became The Observer 's architecture and design correspondent. [4] He writes for a huge range of national and international consumer, trade and professional publications including: The Spectator , The Times , The Independent , The Daily Telegraph , Sud Deutsches Zeitung, GQ , Car , Financial Times , Vanity Fair , and Octane. He has been a contributing editor of GQ since the magazine was launched. He has been a columnist in The Times and The Independent,[ citation needed ] as well as the art critic of The Listener and the architecture critic of The Observer. [1]
As of 2020 [update] he was design critic of The Spectator . [1]
His 1980 BBC2 documentary Little Boxes was the first treatment of design on television. It was produced by Patrick Uden and included unique interviews with Dieter Rams, Ettore Sottsass, Raymond Loewy, and Tom Wolfe.[ citation needed ]
He has also appeared on television series such as Have I Got News for You and Grumpy Old Men .[ citation needed ]
In 1989, Bayley was made a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France's top artistic honour, by the French Minister of Culture and in 1995 he was Periodical Publishers Association Columnist of the Year.[ citation needed ]
He is an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA, a Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, Chairman of The Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust, and a Fellow of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.[ citation needed ]
The American author and journalist Tom Wolfe said of him, "I don’t know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design". [5] [1]
In an article for The Times in 2018, Bayley wrote that if Lord Elgin had not removed the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, they would have been eventually destroyed due to a combination of war and natural decay. Bayley also argued against their repatriation to Greece. [6]
In his Observer column of 22 March 2009, Bayley claimed wrongly [7] that: "Botticelli's model for The Birth of Venus was a common Florentine hooker called Simonetta Vespucci, painted nude to titillate his client". [8] He was arguing against the motion that: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty" proposed by Roger Scruton and David Starkey, who held an image of The Birth of Venus next to an image of the British supermodel Kate Moss, in order to demonstrate how "cruddy" British culture is.[ citation needed ]
As of 2008 he lived in a house in South West London house with his wife, Flo, and their two children, Bruno and Coco. After living there for 25 years, he said that the house was still not finished. [9]
The Elgin Marbles are a collection of Ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures from the Acropolis of Athens, removed from Ottoman Greece and shipped to Britain by agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and now held in the British Museum in London. The majority of the sculptures were created in the 5th century BC under the direction of sculptor and architect Phidias.
Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine,, often known as Lord Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman, diplomat, and collector, known primarily for the controversial procurement of marble sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures on the Acropolis of Athens.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, officially known as the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King and locally nicknamed "Paddy's Wigwam", is the seat of the Archbishop of Liverpool and the mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool in Liverpool, England. The Grade II* Metropolitan Cathedral is one of Liverpool's many listed buildings.
Ryman is a stationery retail company with 205 outlets nationwide in the United Kingdom. The website and stores provide a wide range of stationery and office supplies for homes and businesses, with its headquarters in Crewe, Cheshire.
Robert Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and former museum director. He was editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, then Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, Director of the British Museum from 2003 to 2015, and founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin until 2018.
The Design Museum in Kensington, London, England, exhibits product, industrial, graphic, fashion, and architectural design. In 2018, the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. The museum operates as a registered charity, and all funds generated by ticket sales aid the museum in curating new exhibitions.
Sir Terence Orby Conran was a British designer, restaurateur, retailer and writer. He founded the Design Museum in Shad Thames, London in 1989. The British designer Thomas Heatherwick said that Conran "moved Britain forward to make it an influence around the world." Edward Barber, from the British design team Barber & Osgerby, described Conran as "the most passionate man in Britain when it comes to design, and his central idea has always been 'Design is there to improve your life.'" The satirist Craig Brown once joked that before Conran "there were no chairs and no France."
John Quinlan Terry CBE is a British architect. He was educated at Bryanston School and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He was a pupil of architect Raymond Erith, with whom he formed the partnership Erith & Terry.
The Palazzo Medici, also called the Palazzo Medici Riccardi after the later family that acquired and expanded it, is a 15th-century Renaissance palace in Florence, Italy. It was built for the Medici family, who dominated the politics of the Republic of Florence. It is now the seat of the administration of the Metropolitan City of Florence and a museum.
Neoclassical Hellenism is a term introduced primarily during the European Romantic era by Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
David Rogerson Mellor was an English designer, manufacturer, craftsman and retailer.
Wolff Olins is a global brand consultancy agency that specializes in corporate identity. It was founded in 1965 in London, where its main office is still based, as well as having offices in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It employs some 150 designers, strategists, technologists, environment specialists and programme managers, and has been part of the Omnicom Group since 2001. Since the agency was founded, it has worked for several entities in various sectors including technology, culture, retail, sport, consumer goods, travel, energy and public utilities, media and non-profit.
Greek–British relations are foreign relations between Greece and the United Kingdom. Greece and the United Kingdom maintain excellent and cordial relations and consider each other an ally with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, paying an official visit to London in 2021. Greece and the United Kingdom are both members of the United Nations, NATO and the Council of Europe.
Dorothy Louise Victoria Lobel King is an American author who lives and works in England.
The Twentieth Century Society, founded in 1979 as The Thirties Society, is a British charity that campaigns for the preservation of architectural heritage from 1914 onwards. It is formally recognised as one of the National Amenity Societies, and as such is a statutory consultee on alterations to listed buildings within its period of interest.
Henrietta Sophia Conran is a British designer, retailer, cook and author. She is the founder and director of the Sophie Conran Shop.
Sir Frank Chalton Francis was an English academic librarian and curator. Almost all his working life was at the British Museum, first as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books, and later as Secretary of the museum, Keeper of Printed Books and, from 1959 to 1968, Director and Principal Librarian of the museum.
Bob Bob Ricard is a restaurant near Golden Square in London's Soho district.
Ian Dennis Jenkins was a Senior Curator at the British Museum who was an expert on ancient Greece and specialised in ancient Greek sculpture. Jenkins published a number of books and over a hundred articles. He led the British Museum's excavations at Cnidus and was involved in the debate over the ownership of the Elgin Marbles.
Joel Kissin, originally from New Zealand, is a restaurateur who was the co-founder, managing director, and shareholder of Conran Restaurants. Kissin has been involved in opening a dozen restaurants in London and New York.
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