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Sho w starters
The revamped V&A is looking ahead while relishing the past. By Caroline Roux
Since its inception, the V&A has been a pioneering space for exhibitions celebrating art and design. Caroline Roux meets the women behind its innovative new hub for the museum lovers of today – and tomorrow. Portrait by Rick Pushinsky
The new gallery embodies the role that museums increasingly play – a huge home for shows that are more immersive, entertaining and blockbustery year on year
There is a photog raph in t he V& A’s vast a rchives, dated 1863, that shows four serious-looking fellows with purposefully parted hair and fulsome moustaches, top hats in hands. One is Henry Cole, the museum’s f irst director, a nd a not her is Captain Francis Fowke, a forward-thinking army engineer brought in by Cole to build its early galleries. Fowke sped through his mission, hastily roofing over courtyards to make instant exhibition spaces, and creating an ambitious Renaissance-style master plan for the adjoining Brompton Park House.
Cole was a man of pioneering vision – he set about improving standards of art and design education in Britain, then laid the foundations for the Victoria & Albert Museum as a treasure house and reference point for g reat craf t and desig n from antiquity to the present day.
Now, the V& A is a place that ser ves both past and future equally: a wellspring of innovation and ideas as much as an a rchive of histor ic excellence. It s Futurepla n project has meant 85 per cent of its public spaces have been transformed in some way over the past 15 years, which has kept it not just alive but ahead of the game. And Cole would surely approve.
I was reminded of the image of Cole and co when a rather different group assembled for a photograph at the museum’s Exhibition Road entrance a couple of weeks ago. This was the team behind the V&A’S £50 million extension, which will open to the public on 30 June, and there was no facial hair to be seen. There were the architects Amanda Levete and Alice Dietsch from Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A), and the engineers from Arup – Rachel Harris, Alice Blair and Carolina Bartram. Only the project architect, Matthew Wilkinson, was missing. ‘It’s not because he’s a man,’ said Levete. ‘He just couldn’t make it. We’ve nothing against men. They make up nearly half the office!’
In these two professions, engineering and architecture, it seems t he bala nce of power is f inally beg inning to shif t, t hough t he names of female a rchitect s hardly roll of f t he tongue. Until her death last year, Zaha Hadid seemed to have fully colonised that role both here and abroad. But with the design of the Victorian and Albert Museum’s most significant new project under her belt, Levete should be as near to a household name as the career allows in the UK.
‘Of course we’re going to become more v isible, simply because there are a lot more women architects working now,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never come across any prejudice in my career, certainly not from clients.’
Meanwhile, at Arup, women account for about 10 per cent of the office’s engineers, said Bartram (the engineering industry as a whole, she said, is between seven and 13 per cent women, depending on the discipline). ‘In my first job [Bartram is now 50], all the men were given a bottle of whisky at Christmas by one client, and I was given a bottle of sweet sherry,’ she remembered. ‘That wouldn’t happen now. We do have a way to go, but I think you’ll see a huge difference in the next few years.’
Harris was attracted to the profession as a way to engage with urgent environmental concerns. ‘A lot of my work is to do with sustainability, because I’m a mechanical engineer and work in building services,’ she said. ‘Only 0.4 per cent of the land we excavated here at the V&A has gone to land refill, and our level of carbon emissions here is 25 per cent better than building reg ulations stipulate. These things make me really happy.’ The ‘green roof ’ (planted with a mix of wild flowers for environmental reasons) over the loading bay came with its own set of problems. ‘We had to pick the species of plant so carefully. The V&A were paranoid about pests and moths.’
The extensive excavation means that the extension offers 11,800sq f t of lof ty new column-free exhibition space (over 29ft at its highest), which is called the Sainsbury Gallery. This is reached across a cour tyard made of porcelain t iles, and entered through a double-height foyer, the Blavatnik Hall.
‘It’s the first [public, outdoor] courtyard to be made entirely in porcelain,’ said Levete proudly. She enlisted the help of the ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal, a V&A trustee, in her search for the perfect tiles af ter she met him at a Downing Street party. ‘I don’t see the courtyard as an artwork, but as an expression of the ethos of the V&A itself. It’s like a piece of craft at an industrial scale,’ she told me. The tiles, made by Koninkl- ijke Tichelaar Makkum in the Netherlands (no one in Britain could fulfil the order), are decorated with a stripy pattern in blue, and occasionally yellow and red, that’s derived from the new gallery’s internal pleated roof structure.
In its scale, the Sainsbury Galler y embodies the role that museums increasingly play – a huge home for ex hibitions, such as the V& A’s shows on Alexander Mcqueen and David Bowie, that are more immersive and entertaining and blockbustery year on year. Its first exhibition will be staged in September – an all-singing, all-dancing and altoget her utterly bedazzling display charting the history of opera from the 17th century to now.
A further series of roomy ancillary spaces allows for loans
for a future show to come to the gallery and be logged and conserved while its predecessor is still open. ‘This is what’s needed now,’ said Alice Dietsch. ‘Maximum f lex ibility and a much quicker turnaround. The minute one exhibition is taken down, the next one goes in. It means a lot more visitors throughout the year.’ Now that museums are big business, the bottom line is as important as the cultural content.
Levete and Dietsch certainly weren’t so confident on the day in 2011 when they first presented their scheme to the V&A jury. ‘We had to do our pitch [for the new space] at 9am,’ Levete told me. ‘And they were all completely unresponsive. There was no feedback at all, no reaction. It was quite depressing. I told Alice to take the day off, and I went st raight to John Pearse in Soho and bought myself an expensive coat.’
Clearly, once they’d warmed up a little, the jurors – who included architect David Adjaye, since knighted; Sir Mark Jones, at the time the director of the museum; and the late Moira Gemmill, t hen it s director of desig n – had second thoughts. ‘I think it’s because we looked at it as not just a cultural project but an urban one, too,’ said Levete. ‘We wanted to completely connect the museum to the street and the city.’
Levete founded her own studio in 2009, after splitting up personally and professionally with her partner, the late Czech architect Jan Kaplický. As Future Systems, they had designed some iconic buildings – the Media Centre at Lord’s cricket ground, for example, is like an all-seeing, aluminium-clad eye and was constructed in 1999 using the latest boat-building t e ch nolo g y. In 2 003, t hei r bu i ld i ng for S el f r idge s i n Birmingham, a great biomorphic blob covered in sequin-like discs, put the city on the architectural map.
AL_A’S projects include a new building at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, which opened last year. It has given the city not just 75,000sq ft of exhibition space, but also a nice new slab of public realm – its roof doubles up as a place to walk and sit. Levete said she fell in love with Lisbon ‘when I took my son [Josef ] out of school to see England play Por tugal in Euro 2004, and we lost so ver y badly. Rooney broke [a bone in his foot], Beckham missed a penalty.’ The Portug uese fa ns ra llied a round t he dist raught nine-year-old. ‘I just can’t imagine that happening in England,’ Levete said.
Levete lives with Josef, now 22, her second husband, Ben Evans, director of London Design Festival, and Evans’s three daughters from his first marriage. Their north London home is formed of a Georgian house and a Vic tor ia n s weat shop, sk il f ul ly woven together by Levete and minimally but exquisitely f urnished. The evening before the V&A shoot, Levete and Evans had hosted a dinner for 20 there, for the Mayor’s Cultural Leadership Board. ‘Ben’s the chair. It was nothing to do with me, I’m just the decoration,’ she said.
Ea r l y i n he r ca r e e r, L e ve t e worked i n t he of f ice of Richa rd Rogers. He taught her, she told me, t he impor t a nce of est ablishing a broader way of thinking that underpins the practice of the architecture itself. From him she absorbed the importance of public spaces and the democratisation of culture.
One of the key ideas for Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris – which he designed with Renzo Piano, and which opened to the public four decades ago this year – was t he generous piazza, which gently draws visitors into t he building. Rogers and Piano envisioned the Pompidou as ‘a place for all people’. One of Levete’s primary design turns at the V&A is the courtyard, which will effortlessly draw people off Exhibition Road. She has called it ‘a place for London’.
On top of its gleaming porcelain terrain is a sun-filled café, a new in- and outdoor meeting spot for South Kensington. Lev- ete’s team have even designed the furniture: simple chairs and tables, made from single sheets of scored aluminium, called the 8mm series after the thickness of the material. ‘The mission of the V&A is about industry and design and craft of every type at every scale, and I wanted to reflect that,’ said Levete of her desire to own the entire project.
The rest of the building is hidden below ground. ‘Which is quite a paradox,’ Levete acknowledged. ‘The big event is invisible.’ To redress this, a large oculus has been inserted into the courtyard, allowing a look into the gallery from the outside, and sharply framed views from the inside. The building’s interior doesn’t pull its punches. Two highly choreographed staircases swish around each other, and narrow passages lead to wide-open spaces, like a perfect Renaissance city. The gallery itself is as big a cathedral, though comfortably so, as the pleated roof filters cool daylight into the space, and leaves a few shafts of sunshine on the warm grey walls.
‘It doesn’t get better than this,’ said Dietsch as she surveyed the completed project. But the engineers couldn’t keep their eyes off the three steel columns that soar up 23ft between the stairs and are painted international orange – a colour used in the aerospace industry to set certain components apart from t heir sur roundings (a var ia nt is used for t he Golden Gate Bridge, too). ‘We built an amazing building in a space that wasn’t there,’ said Alice Blair. ‘And we managed not to damage anything along the way. Ten years ago, we couldn’t have done this, but new technology meant we could assess just how close we could go to the existing buildings. It’s funny how easy it all looks now, but that’s the result of a really good collaboration, isn’t it?’ She looked at her colleag ues. ‘Yes,’ said Dietsch, ‘and of all the pain.’