The solution was to bring daylight in where possible. First into the stairwell that brings the visitor from the existing building into the new one where the light goes from strong (thanks to the glazed aperture to one side) to more attenuated and then to bright again at the bottom of the staircase thanks to an overhead skylight. A jagged oculus in the gallery ceiling provides geometric shafts of daylight directly into the exhibition space and doubles up as a vitrine allowing visitors to see the 14 steel trusses that form the ceiling and support the courtyard.
Lack of light was only one of many problems to be overcome during the build. Another major one was maximizing the size of the gallery so it could comfortably host V&A’s headline shows in a way the museum’s existing constrained spaces could not. This meant piling very close to Grade I listed buildings (dating from the early 1900s), which all had slightly different foundations and often projecting cornices as well.
The gallery also had to be column-free and the architects had to span 38 m from one side of the courtyard to the other. Generally this would not be a difficult thing to do, admits Wilkinson, but the museum wanted to be able to hang artworks and lights internally and welcome crowds of people above in the courtyard, which added a huge load onto the roof. “The deeper the truss the deeper the hole you have to dig, and obviously the more expensive and challenging the project becomes,” he continued. By designing a folding roof the architects were able to eliminate the chords at the bottom of the trusses and open up the ceiling between the deep sections, making the whole space feel more generous.
Upstairs the courtyard is clad in 11,000 porcelain tiles and is the first all-ceramic piazza of its kind. Working with ceramics was a way to reference and honour the museum, which houses one of the world’s best collections of the material. To bring the material into the 21st century the architects generated the courtyard pattern digitally, deriving it from the geometry of the gallery’s very particular structure. “It was a striped pattern and we included the joints in the pattern, that way we could use the pattern to dissolve the grid of the tiles,” explained Wilkinson. To further ensure the courtyard did not read as a grid of tiles the architects chose to make the floor tiles parallelogram-shaped instead of rectangular and lay them on a diagonal.
This orientation of the porcelain courtyard was an intentional move on the part of the architects to differentiate old and new and frame views of the old with the new additions. “The existing structures are rectilinear and their orthogonal orientation contrasts with the diagonal theme and orientation of the courtyard,” said Wilkinson. This move is echoed in the folded roof of the gallery ceiling and the undulating and faceted shape of the café roof, whose low-slung ceramic-clad form reveals for the first time to the public a sgraffito on the facade of one of the museum’s nearby wings.
The last but possibly most important aspect of the project was the opening up of the original 20th century stone screen designed by English architect Aston Webb that closed off the museum to the now semi-pedestrianised Exhibition Road. The screen – which bore the scars of shrapnel damage sustained during WWII – was dismantled during the works and put back together as a permeable colonnade with perforated 35 mm thick metal gates in place of the stone balustrades and a larger gate in the centre. By making the perforations at different angles the imprint of where the shrapnel marks used to be is clearly legible and memorialised. Though closed at night the new gates remain open during the day allowing people to wander in off the street, but also, and importantly, to drift between the other big museums and cultural institutions on Exhibition Road – such as the Natural History and Science Museum – in a much freer way than ever before.
