Architect: MUMA (UK)
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&) is "the world's greatest museum of Art and Design". Throughout its history the museum has used its own built fabric to showcase pioneering architectural design and constrcution craft, and MUMA's project to create the new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries, located on three levels, reflect the desire to continue the tradition.
The architectural approach is distinctly modern with clear articulation between the old and new. The contrast and spatial tension between the surrounding architectural volumes that define the Daylit Gallery - the powerful curved form of the East Hall apse and the adjacent rectilinear blocks, provides the generator for the intervention. Translucent glass beams, ranging from 5m to 9.5m long, are arrayed across the space, reconciling the slightly rotated cubic forms of the surrounding buildings with the pure semi-circle of the apse to the East Hall, creating a delicate, undulating roof. The result is an informal yet dramatic four storey high gallery space with contrasts with the formal nature of the surrounding galleries.
In keeping with the spirit of a museum that celebrates design excellence, the modern intervention employs innovative construction technologies - ones that are clearly distinct from the historic fabric but also, through form and materials, in harmony with it. By these means we have created the first new-build public space at the museum in over 100 years.
