Posts Tagged V&A
V&A unveils £35m plans for courtyard and underground gallery
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 28, 2011
Architect Amanda Levete's winning proposal for Victoria & Albert museum likely to fare better than controversial 'spiral' plan
Seven years after abandoning Daniel Libeskind's provocative Spiral extension plan, the V&A has announced a fresh proposal: a "new public space" for London above a huge underground gallery for temporary exhibitions.
Details of the £35m extension plan were announced after an architectural competition to develop what is currently office space on the Exhibition Road side of the V&A.
It follows the decision in 2004 to axe Libeskind's proposal – an eye-catching extension resembling an uneven stack of cardboard boxes. It divided opinion fiercely and when people hated it, they really hated it. Journalist William Rees-Mogg went so far as to call it a potential "disaster for civilisation".
Now the V&A is expanding underground, with British architect Amanda Levete winning the contest to build its extension. Levete said she had "dreamed of working on a major public and cultural project ever since I started as an architect, and it doesn't get much better than this".
The V&A is bullish about raising the money in such austere times and has been helped by an anonymous donation of nearly half the needed £35m. It hopes the extension can be completed by 2015.
The proposal would see visitors walking into an open public courtyard off a newly landscaped Exhibition Road through the screen erected by Sir Aston Webb in 1909 to hide the boilerhouse yard.
The screen would become a colonnade. People will enter what Levete described as "South Kensington's drawing room" with the ground having a carpet-like pattern. It will be a space that can be hired or curated with art or music or film as well as a place to simply sit on the steps or have a coffee. Visitors will also be able to glimpse the new 1,500 sq metre gallery space for temporary exhibitions that will be created below.
Levete was for 20 years co-partner with Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, the firm behind the Selfridges store in Birmingham and the Lord's media centre. After Kaplicky's death two years ago, Levete set up her practice, ALA. The V&A commission is one of a number of projects she is working on. Others include a hotel in Bangkok, a subway station in Naples with artist Anish Kapoor, and a residential tower in Shoreditch, east London.
Levete said the V&A work had been "a very interesting and paradoxical project" because it involved making the invisible visible. "We're creating a vast gallery that is below ground, so how do you create that sense of there being something underground in a way that is subtle?" It is all very different to Libeskind's plan. Levete said of his Spiral: "It was a great building but for me it was in the wrong place and I think the moment for that iconography has passed – it is the moment to do something different."
Paul Ruddock, chair of the V&A's trustees, said the project was essential. "The V&A produces the very best international design exhibitions and the existing exhibition courts, arranged over three separate rooms, are no longer fit for purpose."
The extension is part of the V&A's second 10-year phase of restoration and redesign, called Future Plan.
Also planned is a new fashion gallery scheduled to open in May 2012, furniture galleries for November 2012 and a new textile and fashion centre at Blythe House, Olympia.
Outgoing V&A director Sir Mark Jones said the plan was about creating "stunning new spaces" and returning to the ideas and aspirations of the V&A's founders.
"We've recovered 3,000 sq metres of back-of-house space for galleries and public areas enabling us to show many more objects from the collections better than ever before."
V&A’s new extension: the proposals – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 3, 2011
The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has unveiled seven rival design proposals for a new underground gallery. View the architects' visions here
Japanese architects to build V&A design museum
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 3, 2010
Asymmetrical design by Kengo Kuma & Associates was unanimous choice for V&A-sponsored museum in Dundee
Japanese architects have won a competition to design the first dedicated museum for the V&A outside London, a low-slung angular building on the banks of the river Tay. The "bold and ambitious" design by Kengo Kuma & Associates, a two-part structure of close-fitting slabs made from a stone compound and glass, is proposed for a site in former docks in Dundee, partly sunk into the river Tay.
It would be the V&A's first permanent outpost outside Kensington but the project's backers, a consortium including the city council and Dundee's two universities, said they face a tough fight to secure the £45m needed to finance the building.
Lesley Knox, chair of the project board, said Kengo Kuma's proposal was the most suitable of six "exciting and dynamic" designs from around the world and had won the unanimous votes of the selection committee. "What really swung it is that not only is it an incredibly exciting design, but it also works for us in Dundee. You can design buildings that can go anywhere in the world and you can design exciting buildings which are exactly right for this site," she said.
Rather than pure stone, the winning design uses a strong compound stone which can be manufactured to exact specifications and is more durable and stain-resistant than concrete, ideal for its exposed position on the Tay, Knox said. It features viewing terraces protected from the weather and an "extraordinary" central hall. The two sections would frame the research ship Discovery, used by Captain Scott to explore the Antarctic.
Competing proposals included a rock-shaped building by Vienna's Delugan Meissl Associated Architects and a large glass building by New York-based firm REX which echoed a jutting rock crystal.
Kengo Kuma has designed museums in Japan, including the Suntory museum of art and Masanari Murai art museum in Tokyo, and large corporate buildings such as the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation headquarters in Osaka.
The future of the Dundee plan hinges on whether the Scottish government will support it when the budget is fixed. The project needs £15m from the devolved government and similar amounts from European and lottery funds, and from private sector donors.
Unlike the Tate's offshoots in St Ives and Liverpool, the V&A in Dundee will not house a permanent V&A collection and the parent museum will not meet any of Dundee's costs. But it has signed a 20-year deal to send two or three travelling exhibitions there each year.
The V&A has been staging temporary exhibitions in Sheffield for 10 years and is in protracted talks to have a similar 10-year deal with Blackpool. Dundee's supporters, including the city's Labour and Scottish National party MPs, believe it would help drive the city's economic regeneration.
Knox confirmed it was still far from clear whether the money would be available given the heavy public spending cuts. "Everybody has we've made compelling case, but it's tough times and therefore until the decision is made, we can't prejudge that," she said. "All I can say is we've worked our tails off to make sure we've made our case, and the feedback has been positive."
V&A Museum: Dundee looks for a taste of Bilbao
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 2, 2010
The new V&A Museum on the banks of the Tay offers an opportunity to revamp Dundee's riverside area, says Rowan Moore
"The greatest wonder of the day/ And a great beautification to the River Tay…" wrote the notoriously terrible Dundonian poet William McGonagall in 1878, "That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave/ His home far away, incognito in his dress,/ And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness."
I don't think the backers of Dundee's proposed new outpost of the Victorian and Albert museum would thank me for this quote. This is partly because it celebrated the railway bridge whose subsequent collapse, in the greatest joint engineering-literary tragedy in history, inspired another awful poem. More generally, as the city embarks on a new attempt at beautifying the river, McGonagall's words are a salutary warning of the perils of pretension and hubris.
For the project is the latest attempt at the Bilbao effect. Again and again in the last 13 years, since a certain American museum opened in a certain Basque city, we have heard the same story. Industrial city… down on its luck… "iconic" new building… waterside location… some art… Bilbao effect… bingo!… happy people and buoyant property prices. However effective the original effect might have been, repeated iterations have rarely equalled it and some have been downright catastrophic.
Not that the Dundee project is the work of McGonagalls. So far, it has got things maybe 60% right, which is 55% more than some other attempts to do a Bilbao. It will have, for a start, content, rather than the contrived displays of a made-up museum. It will be a receiving house for the V&A's major shows to which will be added other material locally generated and from elsewhere.
It is a basically good idea that has been tried out with varying degrees of success in the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Pompidou-Metz, the Tates of Liverpool and St Ives, and the Louvres that are coming to the northern French town of Lens and to Abu Dhabi. Blackpool is thinking of getting a V&A of its own.
The building is planned for one of the most spectacular urban locations in Britain. The Tay is Mississippi-wide at this point, with the city sloping up behind and soft hills shaping the horizon. It is also a place cursed with classic planning failures: cut off by road and rail from the rest of the city, with windowless lumps and a prison-like Hilton on the quay. Mike Galloway, the forceful head of city development, has personally drawn up a masterplan for a "mixed-use urban quarter" that aims to clear the lumps and reconnect the waterfront. He has lined up the money to tame the roads and railway and is confident of finding the £45m he wants for the V&A. Sources for funding the all-important running costs are currently more vague.
No one could argue with the idea of rejoining the city with its wonderful river, nor with the V&A spreading enjoyment of its treasures more widely, although some doubt whether the population of Dundee and its surroundings – about 350,000 – is large enough to justify such an institution. But the immediate problem is that most of the shortlisted architects, whose plans went on show last week, and will tour to Glasgow and Edinburgh, have succumbed to a strange case of collective hysteria.
"The word iconic is banned," says Galloway, but no one has told the Austrian practice Delugan Meissl. It has designed a multiply cantilevered wedge, a flattened crystal/UFO represented with images that, with an optimistic view of the Tayside climate, are irradiated with sunlight. The Japanese Kengo Kuma proposes fused inverted pyramids, inside which is an entrance hall of unfeasible vastness.
American Steven Holl goes for height, with a shimmering tower that looks seductive, until you realise that galleries would be on three levels, a completely avoidable irritation for visitors and curators. Rex, a New York practice that has split off from Rem Koolhaas's Oma, has come up with something blue and jagged. It has an intelligent-looking gallery layout, but then spoils it all by claiming, in a nod to local flora excruciating in its clunkiness, that it looks like a bluebell.
If something like the Delugan Meissl scheme could truly be built as pristine as in the images, its extraordinariness might justify itself, but in the saline winds of the Tay this has to be doubtful. On a site of such astounding natural beauty, with one hopes beautiful contents, the architecture does not need to shout so loud.
It is tempting to urge the plainest project on the jury, which is designed by the only Scots on the shortlist, Sutherland Hussey. But it is not without its own fussiness, with much-repeated vertical lines, and the public is bound to compare its boxy form to a power station. The trick is to be simple but not harsh, and Sutherland Hussey hasn't quite pulled it off.
Norwegians Snøhetta has proposed floating the museum, so that it rises and falls with the tide, which is particularly daring after a previous attempt to put art on saltwater, with its now-cancelled plans for the Turner Contemporary in Margate, ended in tears and lawsuits. Assuming similar problems don't arise here, and that it gets rid of the agitated angles that afflict the scheme, this project could be a worthy winner. It creates an intimacy between people, art and water that more bombastic projects lack.
One reason why the architects are overwrought might be that the masterplan for the surrounding buildings, as currently presented, is dull. Beige oblongs are shown, which could easily translate into dumb blocks of a kind that are all too familiar from regeneration projects up and down the country. The gallery designs respond by taking upon themselves the task of making the place interesting, diverting, unusual and different, and implode in the attempt. It would be much better if beauty and budget were spread more between the gallery and its neighbours.
Galloway says that he will insist on quality in the latter and also that the competition is to choose an architect rather than a finished scheme. Both points are welcome: the best thing that could happen would be that either Snøhetta or Sutherland Hussey is appointed and put to work integrating their building with the masterplan.
If this happens, and the still-mushy bits of budget get sorted out, Dundee could truly be a Bilbao that works. And I'll try to spot the Emperor of Brazil at the opening.
Designs on Dundee: architects’ visions for new V&A
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 29, 2010
The Victoria & Albert museum has unveiled competing designs by some of the world's leading architects for a new £47m outpost in Dundee, scheduled to open in 2014. Judge the shortlisted designs for yourself ...
1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces at the V&A
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 14, 2010
Gallery: The V&A museum in London invited 19 architects to submit proposals for small structures to be built full-scale inside its walls
1:1 with the V&A’s Small Spaces
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 10, 2010
A teahouse on stilts, a tower of books, a woodland shelter – seven one-off buildings have taken root in the V&A's galleries. Jonathan Glancey gets a sneak preview of a striking new show
Finding a fairytale Japanese teahouse sprouting from wooden stilts in a corridor of the Victoria and Albert museum is an unexpected yet curiously apposite experience. Unexpected, because this bewitching structure is one of seven brand-new, imaginative and full-scale buildings installed through the museum's galleries this week; and apposite because this glorious Victorian pantechnicon is so jammed with curiosities that Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House looks almost part of the furniture.
It's not immediately obvious, but there is a powerful thread animating and holding together these seven buildings, commissioned by the V&A's curator of designs, Abraham Thomas. The thread is made of what I'd call resistance – architectural resistance to the ever-growing world of buildings that look as if they have been designed by computers and built by robots.
Like Fujimori's teahouse, each building has been designed both as an escape from the world of one-dimensional, globalised architecture, and as a means of expressing what can be done with a paucity of materials and a wealth of imagination. These are not mere installations but solid buildings (you can walk into and through them), placed within the museum in a way that enhances their architectural host and its kaleidoscopic collections. From the top of a timber book tower, for example, named The Ark and designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects (a Finnish-Icelandic team based in Oslo), you look across a wall of books and the frame of the tower itself into the hushed reading room of the National Art Library.
Even better is a plaster cast of an ad-hoc living space in Mumbai, squeezed between a warehouse and the architects' office (Studio Mumbai). Walk in, look out through the chutes and slits that pass for windows, and a cast of Michelangelo's David stares you in the face. It's an odd conjunction, and yet this beautifully cast house, with its shadowy, shoulder-high alleys, narrow stairs, shrine for contemplation, sleeping platforms and internal courtyard wrapped around a plaster-cast tree, is at home amid the V&A's haunting Victorian reproductions of Renaissance marvels.
No architect had a hand in the original Mumbai building, and yet an empathetic local firm has been inspired by its improvised architecture. And there is much to be learned from it: the way its narrow, shady corridors open on to a courtyard where the dazzling Mumbai sunshine is cooled by the canopy of a tree. While poor in terms of electrical and mechanical services, a house like this has more soul and beauty – accidental as well as deliberate – than almost any new home in a modern British cul-de-sac. Sadly, the original Mumbai house has been demolished, but its genial spirit now lives on alongside Michelangelo's David.
Bijoy Jain, who founded Studio Mumbai in 1995 after studying in St Louis, Missouri and working in Los Angeles, has said he is confounded by the mysteries of modern India. He is fighting his own architectural resistance movement against an India in which, as he says, local people are trained to speak in faux-British accents in call centres, while highly trained structural engineers email drawings to overseas contractors to realise expensive buildings (some of them designed by British architects) on the cheap. He designs modern Indian buildings. Like all seven architects contributing to this show, he believes in working with his hands as well as his mind and eyes.
Elsewhere, two very different architectural studios – one from Tokyo, the other from Stavanger in Norway – show how computer-aided design and construction can be used to craft new forms of building, combining the most sophisticated man-made and the rawest natural materials. Sou Fujimoto's Inside/Outside Tree, growing from a landing outside the museum's architecture gallery, is a transparent shelter built entirely of sheets of acrylic polygons, held together by white plastic cable ties. Designed with the help of a computer, the structure is based on that of a stylised tree cut from an imaginary cube. If this sounds a little arcane, the result is enjoyably ethereal – especially when the afternoon sun floods through the high windows behind and sets the structure aglow.
Out in the museum's John Madejski Garden, Helen & Hard Architects (based in Stavanger) have created a building named Ratatosk, after Ratatoskr, a mythological Nordic squirrel. This is made from ash trees that have been split apart and then milled by a computer-driven machine. This curious forest building is currently an empty shelter, but it would make another fine teahouse.
Small Spaces is a modest but inventive exhibition with a powerful message about the importance of nurturing local architecture, whether working with traditional materials or the very latest technologies. Architecture should be led by imagination and skill rather than by slick imagery and marketing. Clearly, those of us who believe this have a long fight on our collective hands, but in the design and making of the V&A's seven small buildings, we have at least the beginnings of the necessary ammunition. When this show closes at the end of the summer, I hope the museum keeps these buildings in its capacious fold. The curators haven't yet made up their minds. But even when they become historic curiosities, these buildings will have something worthwhile to tell us.
V&A Medieval and Renaissance Galleries | Architecture review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 7, 2009
V&A, London
At one point in last week's party to celebrate the V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, I slipped the roaring champagne-chugging throng and visited the (refurbished) loo for relief and reflection, each of a profound nature. Lavatories are always revealing of any civilisation's achievements. Here I found some of ours. There was a Duravit urinal with a trompe l'oeil fly in the target area and a Dyson hand-drier. I'm not one to repudiate the modern world, but compared to upstairs, these made me a bit sad.
For the first time, the museum's astonishing treasures from these defining moments of European civilisation are rationally and beautifully displayed. And the effect is exalting, transcendental. It is an entirely new museum-within-a-museum. If these galleries were a standalone in any other country, it would immediately become one of the world's great museums. Whole institutions have been built around less than Leonardo's Codex Forster, but this is only one of nearly 2,000 superlative objects on display. That these new galleries are only a portion of the whole V&A is bewilderingly wonderful. Here is a resource of incalculable value and meaning.
Architecturally, bright new space has been created within the dark, eclectic chaos of the old museum. What we think of as the V&A is, in fact, mostly an Edwardian facade by Sir Aston Webb, disguising confused layers of different buildings behind it. The unifying effect is illusory: it has always been difficult for even the keenest visitors to make sense of the V&A's collections. Until now.
The new galleries have been designed by McInnes Usher McKnight Architects (Muma) who won the commission in 2003, just three years after the practice was founded. It is their first substantial work. Essentially, Muma ingeniously recovered dark, neglected space in the old museum and fused it with existing cavernous galleries to create three levels bound by a "central orientation hub".
The recovered space is roofed by heroic structural glass, making natural top-lighting a feature of what had hitherto been Stygian gloom. The new volumes are so accommodating that one exhibit is the entire front elevation of Sir Paul Pindar's house. Pindar was the ambassador to the Ottoman court and consul at Aleppo. His house, once on the site of what is now Liverpool Street station was one of the few survivors of the Great Fire. It has not looked so good since 1666.
To describe the individual treasures, mesmerising as a list may be, does nothing to indicate the whole magic of what is now available. Still, it would be negligent not to record that you can see the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries and the Thomas à Becket enamelled casket from Limoges, a superlative object which once contained relics of the martyr. There is the chapel of Santa Chiara, built in Florence in 1494, which the V&A claims to be the only Italian renaissance building outside Italy. Indeed, the museum's collection of Italian sculpture is rivalled only by Florence and Rome. Now it is properly accessible.
Indeed, accessibility is our new best friend. When I was at the V&A in the 80s, the great Giambologna sculpture, Samson and a Philistine (an audacious design since its vast substance is anchored at only five slender points) was in the gloom and once carelessly thwacked by a contractor's scaffolding pole. A Michelangelo drawing had been lost and the hapless director posed for photographers holding a postcard of it. Now, Giambologna is available in all his dramatic swagger in a courtyard garden with tinkling fountain while Leonardo's great Codex is interactively digitised. The modern display cases have fabulously sophisticated mitred glass by Hahn of Frankfurt allowing perfect visual access, works of art in their own right.
On any basis this would all be marvellous, but I sensed something special in the air on the opening night. There was quite extraordinary passion in the crowd. Why was this? Because the exhibits offer rare access to the sense of wonder. They satisfy appetites for physical quality and moral substance which have, by and large, been ignored in the exploitative lightweight crapola served up by, shall we say, the Turner prize. Of course, no one bright enough to walk around unaided needed to be persuaded that Donatello is an artist of the very highest rank, but to have the manipulated enterprise and care that is the Chellini Madonna presented with such immediacy is an epiphany. And not one available in Italy.
In these troubled times, there was a mood of near-religious enthusiasm among the guests. Not that the hedge-funded crowds were dressed in Primark, but the sight of Opus anglicanum needlework does remove you from the comings and goings of shopping. It was extraordinary to see great art enhancing moods: for those who find the Duravit fly and the Dyson Airblade fail fully to address the enigmas of existence, there are object lessons in the objects on display here.
So it is melancholy to note that among the crowds on the opening night, I did not see any leading representatives of the architecture or design professions. So much for Renaissance man. Cue Dark Ages?
The V&A goes underground with shortlisted designs for new gallery
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 3, 2011
The V&A has unveiled seven rival designs for an underground gallery. Let's hope we end up with a stirring art space
• In pictures: the seven V&A designs
Some 15 years ago, the Victoria & Albert Museum planned a new extension that would twist up and out of the ground in a challenging sequence of irregular zigs and zags. This was the Spiral, designed by Daniel Libeskind, architect of the famous deconstructivist Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the mathematician and engineer, Cecil Balmond. Although ingenious, the Spiral was unable to attract the funding required to build it, perhaps £80m at the time. It was also contentious, to say the least, in design terms – enough to cause apoplexy among local residents in plutocratically genteel South Kensington. The project was abandoned in 2004.
Now, the V&A has unveiled seven rival designs for a new gallery, in place of Libeskind's, that spirals underground. This clever reversal of form means that an exciting, even controversial design can exist without dominating the skyline: a very English compromise for a very English space, this grand duchess of a museum that appears forbidding from the outside, but is all decorous charm within.
All seven designs exhibit a lively intelligence. There is the cloistered calm of Tony Fretton's design and the magic carpet effect of Amanda Levete's. Fretton imagines a placid, contemporary medieval courtyard before stairs and escalators on one side of the cloister transport visitors to the exhibition spaces below. Levete's design is more animated than Fretton's, a magic grotto with cascading levels and stairs. Both approaches have their attractions.
Snohetta, the Norwegian studio best known for the stirring new Alexandrian Library in Egypt and the iceberg-like opera house in Oslo, shows how an underground building can have real, attractive presence on the surface. In collaboration with British architect Gareth Hoskins, Snohetta proposes a terrace of great steps stacked behind the existing Victorian stone screen on Exhibition Road (the facade to the courtyard that will house the new gallery). This shows an intelligent architectural balance, between urban theatre and practical planning, that mirrors the V&A itself.
The trick here is to make a compelling entrance that will draw visitors in even if the main building is largely out of sight. The architect chosen for the project has the challenging task of making great presence out of what is, in effect, absence: a hole in the ground. The London Underground, and the Moscow Metro, did this years ago, demonstrating how architecture below the pavement can be among the most elegant and stirring of all.
The new gallery will be used for temporary exhibitions and the winner will be announced at the end of this month. I wonder if one aspect of the Spiral might be revived? The original Libeskind building was due to house new and unexpected shows; its disconcerting architecture was intended to reflect its standing as a powerhouse of the imagination, devoted to new ways of seeing the world through the things we can dream up and make.
Let's hope the new gallery, although largely out of sight, isn't too polite in purpose. The V&A was once called the "nation's handbag": it is a treasury of special things intended to inspire the very best in new design. We'll be watching closely when we get the chance to go underground at the V&A in a few years' time.
• The designs are on display in the V&A Sackler Centre until 3 April
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Culture, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, Museums, V&A
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