Enfilade

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

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

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»