O’Donnell + Tuomey's V&A East Museum Opens in London

Both O'Donnell + Tuomey's V&A East Museum and Diller Scofidio + Renfro's V&A East Storehouse are part of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic legacy. While the Storehouse occupies Here East, the former media center designed by Allies & Morrison for the Olympics, the Museum is a new five-story building on a riverfront site just steps from the London Aquatics Centre designed by Zaha Hadid. Overall, East Bank is just a ten-minute Tube ride from the City of London, while the V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum are a short 15-minute walk apart. 

Per the V&A, the museum that opens on Saturday was “co-created with young people, creatives, and east Londoners, and celebrates making and creativity’s power to bring change.” Accordingly, the museum opens with the multisensory exhibition The Music is Black: A British Story, two permanent Why We Make galleries with objects from the V&A collection, and New Work creative commissions by various artists.

In a statement, John Tuomey, co-founder of O'Donnell + Tuomey with Sheila O’Donnell, describes V&A East Museum as “as a place for people to meet, find ideas and encounter making in all its forms.” Inspired by Cristóbal Balenciaga's fashions and the Japanese concept of “Ma,” the architects designed the building as “a protective outer shell that wraps around an internal core. The space between the facade and the structure becomes a sequence of dramatic circulation routes that guide visitors upwards.”

Before experiencing these spaces, visitors confront the folded facade, which is made from 479 sand-colored precast concrete panels, “each uniquely shaped and scored with profiles that reference the V&A’s distinctive logo,” per Tuomey. He continues: “The linework of the panels align to create a unified pattern along the three-dimensional folded facade that catches the changing light over the course of a day, animating the building’s exterior.”

Inside, the five-story building contains two permanent galleries, a temporary exhibition gallery spanning 900 m² (9,700 sf), a top-floor project and event space, learning facilities, a café, and a shop. The stacked program is accessed via “a continuous circulation route carved from the thickness of the external walls,” in Tuomey's words, while “carefully positioned windows along the circulation routes and three public terraces introduce daylight and bring the outside in.” Though the building's form and its circulation spaces exhibit a certain level of complexity, the interior spaces throughout were kept white to create “a calm backdrop” for exhibitions, art commissions, and live events.