V&A Goes Underground: Plan to Expand under Boilerhouse Yard
From the V&A:
Architectural Studies for the V&A
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 21 June — 19 September 2010
Proposal from Francisco Mangado (Mangado + Asociados)
Eight internationally renowned architects present concept designs for a hypothetical redevelopment of the V&A’s Boilerhouse Yard. The designs, comprising architectural models and plans respond to a brief to create temporary exhibition space below ground and a courtyard at street level off Exhibition Road. The participating practices are:
Jamie Fobert Architects
Tony Fretton Architects Ltd.
Heneghan Peng Architects
Amanda Levete Architects
Francisco Mangado (Mangado + Asociados)
The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)
Sutherland Hussey Architects
Snøhetta
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As reported by Jay Merrick in The Independent (14 July 2010) . . .
The last time the Victoria and Albert Museum tried to build an extension, the design was likened to an exploding cardboard box and sparked an eight-year battle for approval and funding which ended in a resounding no. The episode must have left a bad taste in the mouth as, once Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral design crashed and burned spectacularly after being denied Heritage Lottery funding, the extension was never mentioned again.
Until now. The museum’s project and design director, Moira Gemmill, has revealed that the V&A will hold a design competition this autumn for a major extension on the very site where the bitterly controversial £70m Spiral was intended to go. But there seems little chance that the V&A will risk anything that is architecturally radical; the Spiral may be history, but it still casts a long and very dark shadow.
That eight-year nightmare ended on 16 September 2004 when the V&A’s director, Mark Jones, was forced to concede that the Spiral odyssey had turned into the architectural equivalent of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. The scheme was to have been built on the V&A’s Boilerhouse Yard site, a shambles of offices and plant rooms that lies behind the classical screen along Exhibition Road, designed by Aston Webb in 1891. . . .
The V&A now wants the polar opposite of the upwardly exploding, five-storey Spiral – a flat piazza on the same level as Exhibition Road, with 1500 square metres of new exhibition space beneath it. Costing £30m at most, it will carry less than half the Spiral’s price-tag and, much more significantly, will unlock the second 10-year phase of the V&A’s FuturePlan development strategy.
“We want to create a new semi-public space,” said Ms Gemmill. “The new piazza needs to be absolutely beautifully designed. It can be a place for temporary art, or all sorts of activity” . . . .
The full article is available here»
Reynolds Conference in Geneva
Sir Joshua Reynolds: What’s New?
Université de Lausanne / Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, 16-18 September 2010
Colloque Internation organisé par Jan Blanc (Université de Genève) et Pascal Griener (Université de Neuchâtel)
Ce colloque est le premier événement scientifique organisé en Suisse autour de la carrière, de l’œuvre et de l’univers de Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). Il est aussi l’un des premiers, depuis la dernière grande exposition rétrospective consacré au premier Président de la Royal Academy, à Londres et à Paris (1986), à faire le point des recherches et des travaux les plus récents sur le peintre et son temps. Dans le cadre d’un lieu de rencontres et d’échanges entre les chercheurs et le grand public, il s’agira de permettre aux spécialistes confirmés ainsi qu’aux jeunes chercheurs de se rencontrer, de comparer leurs analyses et de croiser leurs réflexions autour d’un peintre autour duquel de nombreuses questions restent en suspens ou discutées.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
2:00 Jan Blanc et Pascal Griener, Accueil – Ouverture
R E Y N O L D S E N S O C I É T É
2:30 Bénédicte Miyamoto-Pavot, Reynolds en contexte: l’acquisition des arts en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle
3:00 David Spurr, Authorial gestures: Reynolds’ literary portraits
Discussion – Pause
4:00 Frédéric Ogée, Hogarth et Reynolds
4:30 Christopher Martin Vogtherr, The Hertford family painting by Reynolds: A case study in British collecting patterns
Discussion – Pause
5:30 Georges Starobinski, Esprit d’enfance et ton pastoral: un contrepoint musical aux fancies de Joshua Reynolds
Discussion
Fin de la première journée
Friday, 17 September 2010
R E Y N O L D S E N P R A T I Q U E S
9:00 Giovanna Perini, Reynolds in Rome: Notes from the New York and family sketchbooks
9:30 Donato Esposito, Drawn to drawings: Reynolds and the drawn line
10:00 Rica Jones, «Some new stratagem of painting the face all red or all blue or all purple at the first sitting» : Reynolds and the world of portraiture in the 1740s
Discussion – Pause
11:00 Colin Harrison, Reynolds in miniature
11:30 Martin Postle, «New light on an old war horse » : Reynolds’s equestrian portrait of Lord Ligonier
12:00 Cristina S. Martinez, Reynolds and Ramsay: On Tradition, the Nation and the Law
Discussion – Déjeuner
R E Y N O L D S E N T H É O R I E S
2:00 Une table ronde avec Olivier Knechciak et Patrick Vincent, Reynolds, Blake, Wordsworth: Reynolds romantique?
Discussion – Pause
3:30 Iris Wenderholm, The President as reader: Sir Joshua Reynolds and his library
4:00 Elisabeth Martichou, Reynolds and Abbé Du Bos: Towards art criticism?
Discussion – Pause
5:00 James A. W. Heffernan, History, portraiture, landscape: The unruly trio of Reynolds’ Discourses
5:30 Iris Wien, Joshua Reynolds: Myths and metaphors
Discussion
Saturday, 18 September 2010
L É G E N D E S E T S U R V I V A N C E S
10:00 Renate Prochno, Reynolds and Gainsborough: The creation of a legend
10:30 Karen Junod, « A Picture of the Mind » : Biography, Portraiture, and Edmund Malone’s An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author Sir Joshua Reynolds (1797)
Discussion – Pause
11:30 Sam Smiles, Turner’s debt to Reynolds
12:00 Camilla Murgia, Du modèle à l’anti-modèle: la perception de la théorie artistique de Reynolds chez les Préraphaélites
Discussion
The program is available here as a PDF file.
Enfilade 
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