The ten new galleries in the east wing of the V&A – which reopened last week to a tune of 32 well spent millions – are very impressive. I could not make the official opening, but pottered around on Sunday with a friend. Designed by McInnes Usher McKnight Architects, the spaces are extraordinary – especially the bizarre and extremely fun new link areas which have created new surface areas and volumes that can happily accommodate entire frontages of houses. We have, of course, seen this before, as museums worldwide struggle to find space in which to make publicly accessible their hidden collections, and re-invent galleries inside their buildings in which to do this. It requires gutting out and re-imagining outside spaces as inside spaces, and making the new architecture work with what remains of the historic building.
Many similar interventions have been hugely successful - in primis Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum and I. M. Pei’s Deutsches Historische Museum in Berlin. On a smaller scale, but to refer to a project on which I worked, Terry Farrell Architects opening up of vertical circulation within the buildings of the Royal Institution in central London.
But at the V&A the visibility of these innards – spaces that are external to the buildings that make up what we know as the V&A, an architectural jigsaw behind the unifying Edwardian façade – is bright, exciting and plain fun. It is as if the architects have imagined spilling objects out into the in-between spaces, playing between negative volumes on display and entrail volumes of the building.
Natural light floods in from above, accenting all those stupendous other sunlit marble halls dotted around the building, and the negative volumes sing out against the new spaces. It feels like walking around the cutout silhouette of the main galleries – exactly like when making Christmas biscuits you are left with the non-shapes, where circle sat next to rectangle – and you are left with whatever that in between end shape is. Walking through and around, you find yourself connected to the other galleries. It is a joyous, exciting and uplifting experience.
