Tristram Hunt, director of London鈥檚 Victoria and Albert Museum, revealed dramatic plans today for the museum鈥檚 expansion into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. The development comprises the construction of a brand-new five-floor museum and the relocation of the V&A鈥檚 huge research and storage facility to the nearby Here East building 鈥� once part of the 2012 Olympic Games complex and now a thriving tech and creative campus.
Hunt declared the new development a 鈥渃ultural sourcebook鈥�, which if anything rather undersold such a colossal logistical and architectural undertaking. Once the building work is complete, around 2021, the real fun begins, as the US鈥檚 Smithsonian Institution joins forces with the V&A to provide around a quarter of the new site鈥檚 cultural attractions. It鈥檚 a significant departure for the sprawling US behemoth (which boasts 19 museums, 21 libraries, 9 research centres and a zoo), as V&A East will be its first overseas outpost.
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The deal will also bring some of the Smithsonian鈥檚 staggering scientific collection available outside the US for the very first time. (Hunt promptly asked the Smithsonian鈥檚 secretary David Skorton if he could borrow the Space Shuttle. While Skorton couldn鈥檛 promise that, he had pointed things to say about the role of聽institutions like the Smithsonian and the V&A in maintaining international links and fostering global cooperation, even as governments seem hell-bent on throwing up obstacles. (It can鈥檛 have been a coincidence that Skorton made these remarks scant hours before the start of the US mid-term elections.)
In the face of global problems and a fourth industrial revolution, science, art and design are coming back together to solve some huge global problems, Hunt argued: 鈥減roblems we can only address by working on them together.鈥�
Collaboration between nations and across disciplines was, said Skorton, 鈥渟orely needed in the world right now.鈥�
Architects O鈥橠onnell & Tuomey are responsible for designing the new museum building, which succeeds in being at once gobsmackingly radical and endearingly dumpy. Wonderfully, it鈥檚 inspired by the external shape and internal structures of Balenciaga frocks.
For our purposes, however, the V&A鈥檚 storage and research facility provides the main headline. Architects Diller, Scofidio & Renfro plan to core out part of the handsome but essentially anonymous-looking Here East building, creating a kind of panopticon from which the public can view the museum鈥檚 vast and closely packed holdings. Even the floor of the main gallery is clear, allowing for some really quite vertiginous inspection of the ground floor鈥檚 larger treasures. Smaller galleries extend through the surrounding collection, affording additional perspectives, while technology is being developed so that visitors can digitally unpack every crate, and even deploy robot cameras to explore some less accessible corners.
Elizabeth Diller called her firm鈥檚 design 鈥渁n immersive cabinet of curiosities鈥�. She has form in this area, of course, having just completed The Shed, a huge multi-arts venue due to open in New York next year.
Hunt and Skorton are right, of course: collaborations between countries and across disciplines are needful. The V&A鈥檚 news today proves they can also be breathtaking, expensive, exceedingly ambitious, and very pretty indeed.