Opening in the shadow of the former Olympic Park, V&A East seeks to reframe what a national museum can be. Debika Ray visits the building by O’Donnell + Tuomey to explore its architectural strategies for accessibility, sociability and civic presence
It is hard to miss. The new east London home for the Victoria & Albert Museum has not just one, but four large “V&A” signs on it – one mounted near the top, and one each above its entrances at the front, side and rear. The sand-coloured concrete panels on the angular facade are also arranged in a pattern that evokes the letters V and A, as are the pyramidical facets of the structure itself. The V&A brand is announcing its arrival in Stratford from every angle.
In front of the museum, a public square extends its presence to the riverside. Here, two artworks set out its intentions. Lubna Chowdhary’s Temporal Trace sprawls across the ground, an arrangement of lines and dots inspired by the decorative patterns drawn as a welcome across thresholds in India using rice flour and water. A Place Beyond is an 18ft statue by Thomas J Price of a young woman holding a mobile phone and gazing into the distance.
The message: if successful, the V&A East Museum will draw us in and lift our eyes up, off our screens and on to the wealth of physical objects contained inside it.
It has been more than two decades in the making. When the V&A East Museum opens its doors on 18 April, it will be one of the final buildings to complete on the site of the former 2012 Olympic Park, part of a collection of institutions intended to deliver on the Games’ promise of opportunity and social change for the boroughs surrounding what is now called East Bank.
Much has changed in the 21 years since London won the Olympic bid – not least the birth and coming of age of an entire generation of young adults. The museum has this audience squarely in its sights: younger Londoners aged 16 to 35, who might find the grandeur and formality of traditional museums alienating.
Over that time the politics of cultural inclusion have become more central, and the idea of museums has shifted: no longer simply places that safeguard history, but that interrogate the past and reflect the richness of contemporary culture.
The V&A East Museum must speak not only to these priorities, but also to its immediate context: a part of the capital historically defined by deprivation and cultural vitality and, more recently, an intense but uneven process of gentrification that has transformed, sanitised and polarised it, often at the expense of poorer communities and creative practitioners.
It cannot simply make a statement – it must also confront the risk that a new cultural quarter deepens the inequalities which regeneration projects claim to solve.
This presents a symbolic and programmatic burden that no single piece of architecture can possibly bear. It has to be a vehicle for inclusion, regeneration, youth empowerment and civic renewal, all the while informing, entertaining and generating revenue.
Its ambition to be a hub for the creative energies of east London begins to answer some of these questions: a pledge to serve not only tourists and wealthy cultural elites from elsewhere, but the communities that have long existed here.
Meeting this promise is both a curatorial and architectural challenge. The museum’s permanent exhibition, Why We Make – which spawls across two floors – sets out to persuade visitors that creativity is a shared human endeavour. The building aims to reinforce this notion spatially, offering younger people in particular a welcoming indoor space to spend time, socialise and rest without pressure to be productive, active or spend money.
For a building to feel accessible, the journey through it should be seamless
John Tuomey, architect
This starts at the entrance: unlike the V&A’s historic South Kensington home, with its imposing portico and richly ornate facade, the design here strives for simplicity and openness. Windows hug the ground-floor cafe, establishing an immediate visual connection with passers-by, while material continuity – the tactility of the facade and the solid interior flooring – blurs boundaries between outside and inside.
This ease of movement continues. “For a building to feel accessible, the journey through it should be seamless,” says architect John Tuomey. “From the moment you enter until you get to the paid exhibition space on the third floor, you don’t pass through any doorways or corridors – there’s nothing to stop you.”
Transparency, seamlessness and porosity have become part of the contemporary architectural lexicon, often used as shorthand for democracy – as if visual openness equates to inclusion. This assumption is relatively unscrutinised.
Open-plan offices were once presented in similar terms, before it became clear that visibility and sociability do not serve everyone’s needs. Similarly, some people go to museums for retreat, privacy and solitary contemplation.
Whether this sociable museum typology – characteristic of many institutions built over the past few decades – will endure or come to feel emblematic of this moment remains to be seen. But it feels apt as we enter an era where we are increasingly atomised by the draw of the digital.
And it is something the architects have experience of: Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell, co-founders of Dublin-based architecture practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, were responsible for the 2014 RIBA award-winning Student Centre at the London School of Economics, which also created both spaces for quiet study and social encounter. They started working as part of the team that masterplanned the wider East Bank project in 2014, and say they have since engaged in plenty of consultation with local people.
“We went to meet people in youth groups, studios, community centres, theatres, men’s sheds, and we held open days,” Tuomey says. The practice also designed a new theatre for the Sadler’s Wells dance company – and therefore the two principal public-facing buildings that bookend the riverside terrace of institutions in East Bank.
There was a concern among trustees that V&A East should have a recognisable identity
John Tuomey, architect
When the V&A decided to relocate its entire collection to Stratford after vacating its longstanding storage facility in west London – to the nearby V&A Storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro – it freed the museum to function wholly as an exhibition space. The architecture needed to live up to this. “There was a concern among trustees that V&A East should have a recognisable identity,” Tuomey says.
The concept emerged during a visit to the National Gallery in Dublin, where the architects were struck by the large, puffed white sleeve of a woman in Vermeer’s painting Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (c.1670). A visit to the V&A South Kensington, where Tuomey encountered an X-ray photograph from 2016 by Nick Veasey of a silk-taffeta evening dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga – a garment stored and available to view at the Storehouse – helped to consolidate the idea that went on to shape the building’s aesthetic, spatial experience and internal organisation.
The final building reads as a skeleton with an overcoat draped over it. From outside, the facade appears to hang from the shoulders of the structure, falling down to its feet and lifted coyly at the hem to reveal the activity inside. At its heart are the essentials – galleries, shop and hidden functions such as fire escapes and services.
Between outer layer and internal core lies what the architects describe using the Japanese concept of “ma”: a negative space that is not merely empty, but full of meaning. It takes the form of a generous stairway with glimpses out of the building as you travel up and plenty of space for pause.
The reference to clothing is apt given that the neighbouring London College of Fashion is visible from multiple levels and accessible from an entrance just beside it. “We wanted to have a conversation with the neighbouring buildings,” says Eimear Hanratty, associate director at O’Donnell + Tuomey. The proximity creates both a literal and symbolic connection between the two.
The interiors spaces, designed by JA Projects alongside A Practice for Everyday Life and Larry Achiampong, draw on the dynamic of high streets and parks – urban environments that are arguably more familiar for many younger visitors than museum galleries. Shop front-style glazing offers views to the exhibits, while the circulation areas are dotted with benches by London-based designer Andu Masebo.
The galleries are arranged to encourage self-directed wandering. “Curatorial sections become neighbourhoods you can move between, while larger displays act as landmarks that orient you, much like moving through the city,” says Abby Bird, senior architect at JA Projects. Illuminated signage nods to the high street while offering wayfinding cues.
The material palette includes wood from London trees that needed to be felled, while the exhibition architecture is designed for flexibility and therefore longevity, with interchangeable shelves and hanging systems.
The prominence of commercial references across the building – the high street aesthetic, the visibility of the cafe and shop, and the heavy branding of the V&A signs – is revealing. By borrowing the familiar language of retail, which has filled a space civic institutions have vacated, the V&A appears to be acknowledging the urgent need for museums like it to restate their relevance at a time when institutional trust is waning.
Architecture may offer a fresh focus and optimism for the future, but it cannot resolve deeper questions facing museums today: who their historic collections represent, how they were acquired, and what they owe to the people and cultures from whom they were taken.
In that context, the references that shaped the building – the Vermeer sleeve and Balenciaga silhouette – are worth contemplating. They may be elegant, but they remain rooted in an artistic canon that feels somewhat at odds with the museum’s ambition to engage the neglected cultural realities of east London.
The result is a building that feels true to this moment of flux – speaking a language of contemporary international museology, while cautiously pointing to a future that is still unclear. The rest will be for the programme to answer.
The building’s true test, meanwhile, will be less in how it looks or what it symbolises, but how it is used. Already, the broad ledges facing the London College of Fashion are populated by students on lunch breaks and soon they will be allowed inside.
“It’s a marvellous thing, when you step out of the way and see the building being appropriated by the public,” Tuomey says. There is not long to wait until we see whether east London will make this space its own.
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