Victoria and Albert East Storehouse and East Museum
- Nigel Wakeham
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
I recently spent an afternoon in Stratford visiting the two new Victoria and Albert museums there, the V & A East Storehouse and the V & A East Museum.
The V & A East Storehouse is housed in an enormous building some 275 metres long, that was originally built as the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympic Games. This has been transformed by Diller, Scofido and Renfro, a US firm of architects, into a huge cabinet of curiosities.
The entrance through an innocuous looking door at one end leads into a lobby with a café to one side, educational spaces to the other and a staircase straight ahead that leads up to and through an airlock and into a three-storey high central atrium, artificially top-lit, with seemingly infinite runs of shelving on all four sides. As the reviewer in the Guardian put it ‘it’s like an Amazon warehouse only stuffed with all the world’s treasures or to quote John Masefield, it’s a real ‘Box of Delights’!
One could spend days exploring the contents of the building but our time was limited and the highlights for me were a film about the demolition of Robin Hood Gardens (designed by the Smithsons, it should never have been demolished; a section of the concrete cladding rescued from the demolition site hangs down one side of the atrium); the spectacular carved and gilded ceiling dating from around 1490 which came from a palace in Torrijos, Spain and the office designed for Edgar J Kaufman by Frank Lloyd Wright that retains all of its original furniture, woodwork, textiles and carpet all designed by FLW.
We then walked from the Storehouse to the newly opened V & A East Museum, about 10 minutes’ away. The Museum was designed by the Irish practice, O’Donnell + Tuomey and is adjacent to the London College of Fashion (designed by Allies and Morrison) and the architects have explicitly referred to fashion in explaining the origins of the design. It apparently started with the folds in a sleeve in a Vermeer painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland and further ideas of draping and concealment came from the work of the Spanish couturier, Cristobal Balenciaga.
John Tuomey compares the design to a protective jacket, a kind of futuristic outerwear: ‘we hollowed out spaces, so when the public sees the shape on the outside, they can sense the shape on the inside, before they enter’. The ‘Jacket’ is tailored from chunky, pigmented, pre-cast concrete panels, the colour of honey all supported by a steel sub-structure. The building appears as a pavilion in the round, folded and faceted like a giant piece of origami standing in such a way says Tuomey ‘that it looks as though it’s inviting people to pour in through the tent flaps.’
This is all very well but I am afraid that it did not work for me! In the first instance, it is not possible to see the building in the round as it is located very close on one side to the London College of Fashion and their juxtaposition looks very awkward and does nothing to enhance the Museum. There is no sense of drapery in the concrete panels; they just look heavy! It is, to my mind, a very ugly building.
Matters do not improve on the inside. The galleries are all internal with no natural light and are fairly boring and underlit and when we were there the air-conditioning system did not seem to be working properly and they were very warm and humid. There is a lot of space wasted in the circulation areas caused by the sloping walls (and the need to keep stairs and circulation space away from them) and these are also very under-lit due to the lack of windows. A lot of the detailing is underwhelming and this is especially the case for the windows, the frames of which are very bulky and obtrusive. The detailing of the handrails to the staircases must have been a nightmare for the poor bugger who had to do them due to the sloping walls to the sides of many of them and the terrazzo stair treads and floor finishes are pretty bog standard and not very subtle. There is a large viewing gallery on the top floor which seems to be overlarge and which is totally unprotected from the sun wind and rain.
One might say, ‘whatever happened to ‘form follows function’’ but I think that this probably gets to the heart of the problem. The Museum, unlike the Storehouse does not seem to have a properly defined function. It appears that the V & A wanted to have a museum in the East London Arts Quarter but did not really know what to do with it. There are a few nice objects on display (a beautiful Indian painting for instance) but there is no sense of an overall purpose. The London College of Fashion next door is not a beautiful building but it is simple and straightforward and seems to fulfil its brief and is to my mind a much more functional building.
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Architecture in Developing Countries: A Resource
The design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health in rural areas of the developing world.
Nigel Wakeham worked as an architect for 23 years in Southern and West Africa and the SW Pacific working on education, health and other projects. He has since worked for over 20 years as a consultant for national governments and agencies such as the World Bank, DFID, ADB and AfDB on the implementation of the construction components of education and health projects in many countries in the developing world.
The objective of this website will be to provide the benefit of more than 45 years of experience of working in developing countries to architects and other construction professionals involved in the design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health. It will provide reference material from the projects that Nigel has worked on and technical information on the design, construction and maintenance of educational and health facilities and other relevant topics and these will be added to from time to time.
I am happy to be contacted by anyone requiring further information on any of the projects or resources referred to in this website or by anyone wishing to discuss work possibilities.
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