London, United Kingdom

“Working with historic buildings is a great challenge and one that means it’s important to understand what is really there, and why it might be like that,” explains Sam Jacob, architect.

Sam Jacob’s Victoria & Albert Museum transformation includes a new entrance lobby in V&A’s Cromwell Road entrance, a new information desk, and new WCs using elements that refer to the museum’s collection and upgrade the visitor’s experience.

The project argues that design is not just something to be put on a pedestal but is part of the everyday activities of life.

The design response works to complement the existing Aston Webb designed grade I listed building in a contemporary way.

It draws on the long tradition of the museum’s functions acting as moments of delight that began with the world’s first museum cafe – the Gamble, Poynter, and Morris Rooms opened in 1886 that showcased radical contemporary design as part of the visitors’ museum experience.

The new entrance lobby is formed by three bands of glass tubes arranged with 120mm diameter tubes on the lower level, then halving in size to 60mm then 30mm on the mid and upper levels.

The glass produces optical distortions that accentuate the movement of people as they pass through the entrance.

It also captures and projects daylight into the museum, with the whole structure helping to illuminate the interior.

The glass here is used for the way it transmits light. 

“The glazing for the entrance – especially the glass tubes – were a way to retain a sense of transparency at the entrance, but also to dramatize the way light is transmitted into the space,” says Jacob.

“The effect of the tubes is to act like lenses, and the movement of people through the entrance becomes visually more animated, producing different effects as the daylight changes over time,” he adds.

“It’s also a response to the large arched window above, that has texture and color to the glass so that the whole interior elevation now acts in a similar way.”

It nods towards the museum’s own ways of categorizing design, here echoing effects you might see in the glass collection.

The new sets of sliding doors simplify the act of entering the museum and help improve the museum’s environmental performance.

The bag check desk is provided by new moveable stations whose design features bronze circles and triangles set into matt black Richlite making a subtle contemporary reference to the existing pattern of the marble floor.

As anyone who has been to a party at the museum knows, the ticket and information desk in the center of the Central Hall also acts as a bar for evening events.

The key design problem was to enable this day-to-night switchover to be as efficient as possible, allowing point of sale terminals, ticket printers, cash draws, and so on to be smartly packed away before the revelries commence.

Faced with glass tubes back with mirror panels, the front desk both reflects and distorts the movement around it, adding a sensation of mysterious depth and animation to its surface.

The lighting of the desk changes from something more subtle during the daytime to more disco at night.

As far as the WCs are concerned the architect has created terrazzo wall panels that used rejected jasperware from Wedgewood’s factory in Stoke.

For that case, the studio collected 700kgs of blue, pink, black, and grey ceramics and crushed them to form the panels.

This creative use of waste material also draws on the V&A’s historic connections to Wedgewood – not only his statue on its facade, but the links to the V&A gallery in Stoke, and the displays of jasperware at South Kensington.

“Terrazzo is a material you often find in these kinds of spaces, so our intention was to introduce a really unusual material element by using the waste jasperware,” states Jacob.

“It is a material that resonates with the history of the V&A, and with the history of British applied design and with a certain luxury,” he adds.

“Even in a fragmented state, jasperware colors are instantly recognizable. Using it in this smashed-up state, and making a feature of its brokenness, felt like a very modern take on those traditions.”

The panels also play on the care that the museum takes for its ceramic collections, while here in the basement, the same types of vessels have been smashed to pieces.

“It also feels a little perverse – using broken ceramics in a museum where objects are usually incredibly carefully looked after,” Jacob says. “But a beautiful kind of perversion – all the colored fragments make a speckled color field to the walls that surround you.”

“It’s an interesting experiment in the high concept reuse of waste material, about how we care for objects and the impact that the production of designed objects has on the world.”

The interior of each cubicle is tiled with a lifesize figure, taken from the museum’s ceramic collection.

Scaled up and digitally printed onto colorful tiles, these allow a different kind of encounter with the museum’s collection.

In the new accessible toilets, the same technique has been used with landscape references from the collection.

The museum’s remodeling upgrades the visitor experience while also providing a contemporary response to the materially and symbolically rich language of the museum’s existing building.

It explores the possibilities of an applied arts institution that, just as it has done since its foundation, embeds design within its own fabric.

Design is not only displayed in the museum but also becomes the fabric of the museum itself.

Project: V&A Museum’s Transformation
Architects: Sam Jacob Studio
Lead Architect: Sam Jacob
Lighting Designers: Studio ZNA
Structure Engineering: Price and Myers
Main contractor: Alcema
Specialist Fabricator: Millimeter
Terrazzo: Diespecker
Quantity Surveyor: Currie Brown
Client: V&A Museum
Photographers: Timothy Soar