A first look at the V&A's new underground gallery and entrance courtyard

Amanda Levete's new underground gallery for the V&A is a soaring achievement, while her Exhibition Road entrance courtyard connects the new with the old
Robert Bevan30 June 2017

The V&A’s largest building project for a century has just been completed on Exhibition Road. You’ll be forgiven for overlooking it.

Instead of winding upwards as Daniel Libeskind’s ill-fated Spiral proposal would have (and, indeed, a Henry Cole proposal from the 19th century), the new wing instead drills down into the ground beneath the museum’s historic buildings and spaces.

In the process, architect Amanda Levete, of AL_A, has created an audacious, lofty room for London that may be hidden but, covering as it does the area of almost five tennis courts, is by no means modest. This is one South Kensington iceberg development worth all the digging, the stop-start, and the architectural competitions that began back in 1996.

Following the demise of the Libeskind Spiral, the V&A had a rethink about its needs and firstly commissioned Rem Koolhaas/OMA to carry out a feasibility study that suggested that to find enough space for a large temporary exhibitions room it should dig down. Levete won the subsequent competition to flesh this thought out, at a cost of almost £55 million.

The result is the Sainsbury Gallery, a 1,100 sq m column-free exhibition space that will be home to the V&A’s blockbuster exhibitions, freeing up the existing South Court to be restored from black box to the magnificent museum centrepiece it once was (and the North Court too).

Beneath the new sunken wing is a further huge floor which now holds the museum’s access dock and other back-of-house essentials such as a lift large enough to carry a maharajah’s Rolls and other collection oddities.

The Sainsbury Gallery is the V&A’s second phase of restoration and redesign known as “FuturePlan”, where the museum has proved itself to be an adept client in upgrading its sequence of renewed spaces. The hope is to create clarity out of its complex montage of a home.

The site for this lurking leviathan was originally a garden but with Aston Webb’s Edwardian remodelling of the V&A it was supposed to house an underground boiler house — subsequently built above ground. Webb’s massive 1909 stone screen on Exhibition Road increasingly became a device to hide temporary buildings shoehorned in behind. It was a mess but also, at the end of the 20th century, the home to the innovative Boilerhouse gallery, which eventually morphed into the separate Design Museum.

In an attempt to give the invisible a presence, Levete has swept all this away and has created a new entrance, the Sackler Courtyard, on the west side of the complex by persuading the authorities to knock through Webb’s screen between its columns. In a world first for an external court, she’s floored it in handmade creamy porcelain tiles, with a subtle stripe that echoes the roof structure of the gallery beneath, and folds up to form a new ground-level café pavilion. The porcelain is intriguing but also stark and glaring in the sun.

Visitors are subtly guided down steps or a gentle ramp, past funnels that offer glimpses down into the exhibition hall beneath, to arrive at the entrance doors, where a traditional brick and stone frontage has been sliced through and glazed. It’s strikingly bold.

Inside the new entrance hall, named Blavatnik Hall, mosaic floors have been reworked to create a border of grey triangles which echo the structure of the new gallery. A part glossy, part matt staircase in black-stained tulip wood, and a white lift within a chamfered white cube, are the ways down to the new basement.

This staircase turns and turns again, leading you down into exhibition space beneath another glazed slot and past steel columns and plates in engineering orange that support the buildings above. It’s a clever way of getting daylight to penetrate deep underground and to orientate yourself on a complex journey that takes you in and out, above and below the V&As historic wings, allowing hitherto unavailable views of the Grade I-listed structures and V&A’s central John Madejski Garden. Finally you arrive at the Sainsbury Gallery proper, the soaring hall for temporary exhibitions, the first of which opens in the autumn. But from Friday a week-long series of free events will allow gallery-goers to see it in its unencumbered glory.

The clever roof structure is made up of 14 V-shaped trusses each 38 metres long which together form the folding plate structure and ceiling. The partially top-lit room can be divided up in various ways.

As with all galleries of this type, the apparent simplicity hides myriad complex air handling, lighting, power and hanging systems. You can suspend a ton from any of the beams. Design strategies that succeed in taming all this gubbins are to be admired.

A strange decision, perhaps, is the provision of two separate staircases — one to take you down and one to take you back up to ground level. It’s partly an attempt at handling large numbers at the hoped for blockbusters (and to deposit you right in the gift shop afterwards) but it feels rather too controlling an experience — especially in comparison to the V&A’s otherwise free-range character. Let’s see the staircases in crowded use — a theatre of descent as Levete put it — before judging whether this circulation device is helpful or an irritant.

Levete’s choice to have the entrance staircase integrated within an existing wing rather than segregated in the courtyard is an acknowledgment of the importance of connecting the new to the old. This new entrance is, however, likely to be more used than the existing Cromwell Road vault with its reception desk, loos, shop and galleries spoking out in various directions.

For Levete, creating a new urban place was as important as creating a cultural space and it certainly helps restore something of the sense of a museum quarter along Exhibition Road. However it also has the potential to confuse existing routes internally: the new entrance hall is deliberately different from that on Cromwell Road in nature.

Here you will be met by wandering greeters who guide you to the sloping bank of touchscreen ticket machines. But Blavatnik Hall is far, far smaller and further away from the bulk of permanent galleries. And while not yet populated with airport-style queuing bollards and belts, these may yet make an appearance and substantially change its character.

The V&A certainly has a huge and hugely elegant new wing but is the tail now wagging the museum dog with the money-making blockbuster shows upfront and the permanent galleries somewhere behind in the distance? An architecture of changed priorities?

REVEAL festival at the V&A, SW7 (020 7942 2000, vam.ac.uk) opens on Friday

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