Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter – Gallery, 2017

Amanda Levete RA (b. 1955)

RA Collection: Art

This digital design for Amanda Levete's V&A Exhibition Road Quarter extension shows her finished plan of the new gallery built below ground level. The green areas indicate the pre-existing structures of the museum while the red areas are Levete's additions and interventions. This major transformation of the site was first announced in 2012 as the largest expansion of the museum in over a century, providing 6,400 square metres of additional space incorporating the gallery as well as a courtyard and facilties including a shop and cafe. The new space opened to the public in June 2017.

The V&A extension was the first public project in the UK completed by Levete at her AL_A firm and she describes it as a project 'close to her heart'. Levete was previously a partner in Future Systems with Jan Kaplicky but left in 2009 to found her own practice. At AL_A (formerly Amanda Levete Architecture), she and her directors work on every project from the outset, beginning with conversation rather than sketches. Levete states that 'our aim is to understand the purpose of a project, what's going to drive it and unlock its potential'.

At the V&A, they began with the concept of 'making the invisible visible' as referenced on this design. One of the major outcomes of this interest was the decision to highlight the museum's extensive collection of ceramics with a courtyard paved with 11,000 handmade porcelain tiles in fifteen different linear patterns. In addition to referencing the museum's collections, the design seeks to thoroughly break down 'the separation between street and museum' as part of 'a more ambitious intention: to make Exhibition Road a place where culture and learning are accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds'.

The gallery, meanwhile, provides purpose-built temporary exhibition space with no columns to obstruct the flow of the display. Instead, the building is supported by a steel structure of fourteen metal trusses across the ceiling. Levete commented, 'We came up with a structure that is a folded metal plate because when you fold something it adds stiffness, when you fold a piece of paper it becomes very stiff, it's a very efficient way of creating a large span'. An oculus from the courtyard above brings daylight into the space.

Realising Levete's scheme, with the gallery 18 metres below the courtyard, meant carrying out complex structural works while the Museum remained open to the public. The colonnade screening the museum from the street, designed by Aston Webb and erected in 1909, had to be removed for access to the site and was afterwards rebuilt minus some of the original stones to open up vistas between the courtyard and Exhibition Road.

Levete's V&A extension engages with many of her interests as an architect - issues of history and craftsmanship and their dialogue with modernity as well as the importance of public access and space.

Further reading:

https://www.ala.uk.com/selected-projects/va-exhibition-road/

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-history-of-the-va-on-exhibition-road

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/28/ala-amanda-levete-v-a- victoria-albert-museum-exhibition-road-quarter-courtyard-gallery- london/

https://www.cladglobal.com/architecture-design- features?codeid=31968