The V&A’S new £48m triumph
V&A Exhibition Road Quarter
In 2004, the Victoria and Albert Museum suffered one of the more embarrassing episodes in the institution’s history, when it was forced to abandon a competition-winning design for a major extension after eight years’ fundraising failed to muster the necessary £100million. The so-called Spiral – the work of Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-american architect – was a child of the then recently completed Bilbao Guggenheim: a colossal tower of tumbling boxes, of questionable worth as exhibition space but an undeniable urban sensation.
And yet, frustrating as the project’s demise was at the time, the museum soon came to recognise that it had dodged a bullet. While the Spiral would have offered a series of modestly scaled galleries (connected by a lot of stairs), it became clear that a much more pressing requirement was the provision of one very large gallery where temporary exhibitions could be staged. The only way to accommodate a room of such scale on the museum’s heavily built-up site was to put it below ground: a major engineering challenge in any context, let alone that of a Grade I listed building. None the less, after five years of building work – all of it undertaken while the museum was fully operational – its £48million subterranean expansion will soon be open to the public.
The Sainsbury Gallery – the work of Amanda Levete, the London-based architect – is a game-changing addition to the museum’s arsenal of exhibition spaces. The existing temporary galleries are cramped, bisected by a corridor and suffer from the presence of a retro-fitted suspended ceiling. By contrast, the Sainsbury is a Batcave of a space, rising to a monumental 34ft, and entirely unimpeded by columns, thanks to the use of a roof structure of pleated steel plates. The gallery opens to the public for one week from this Friday, serving as the site of a series of performances and interventions, but we will have to wait until September to see what the museum’s curators have made of their new toy with the opening of the inaugural exhibition, Opera: Passion Power and Politics.
However, it is not just the new gallery that promises to be transformative. Equally significant is a public space that Levete has created directly above it, serving as a new entrance for the whole museum. The Sackler Courtyard is accessed off Exhibition Road, a long, axial street which, in 2012, was the subject of a pioneering remodelling that removed all distinction between road and pavement. The resultant “shared surface” elevated it from a visually cluttered rat-run to a grand boulevard where pedestrians enjoy priority over cars.
The new courtyard capitalises on this change of atmosphere, bringing the street into the body of the museum. In achieving this, Levete had to contend with the presence of a masonry screen which the building’s original architect, Aston Webb, had installed on the street-line as a means of disguising the museum’s boiler-house. The most controversial aspect of her work has been the creation of a series of new openings in this listed structure, which are now fitted with gates of perforated aluminium. No one could claim that Webb’s design has been enhanced by the change, but I had to conclude that the alterations represented a price worth paying for the new sense of connection to the street.
The courtyard itself comprises a series of faceted planes, faced in handcrafted porcelain tiles – a choice that draws association with the abundant use of ceramics in the museum’s earlier buildings.
A café on one side and the large oculus by which daylight is admitted to the gallery below are the only interruptions to an admirably open space, from where Webb’s elevations can be viewed to altogether better effect than was previously the case. In time, sculpture may be introduced – the floor has been engineered to support a Henry Moore – but this is essentially a social space, and will remain open to the public outside museum hours.
Conceived in the high summer of the British Empire, Webb’s buildings impress by virtue of their scale and monumentality, but they don’t exactly beguile. Where Libeskind’s response was to work in dramatic opposition to the original architecture, Levete has achieved something subtler but ultimately more subversive, making the museum more approachable, and binding it into the 21st-century city.
Opens this Friday. For more information, visit vam.ac.uk