Architecture at the V&A

The V&A's architecture collections comprise everything from the building itself, the copies and fragments here in this room, thousands of architectural drawings spanning history, hundreds of models and everything in between. We're standing in one of the two cast courts at the V&A which opened in 1873 and have the most amazing collection of plaster casts from all around the world. All of these sculptures and architectural fragments are made of plaster so they're copies of artworks which are mostly in Europe. Part of this great grand Victorian ideal to really bring the grand tour and fit it into one room here in London so that education of art and study of these these artworks could be democratised and accessible to the public. Architecture in a sense is a discipline of accommodation, it's a practice of accommodation that is able to bring differences together and to accommodate them not only just in a harmonious whole but sometimes in a productive tension. The object that I've chose is a book by Durand in French, it's commonly called the Requil. It is a collection of large plates of drawings that brings together different buildings into a single page using the same scale in orthographic projection for comparison and analysis. There are two motivations to the work of Durand in the Requil. The first one of course is to introduce a scientific method to the study of architecture, that is to say that to make the discipline of architecture more rational and more empirical. The other one is to actually to make the knowledge of architecture more accessible to the common people. It is one of the first examples in which the utilisation of drawings was used to bring about buildings as diverse as pagodas, mosques, Egyptian temples alongside gothic cathedrals and also thrown into the mix would be Christopher Wren's St Paul's and so forth. But actually when you bring them together you see that they actually have a lot of characteristics that they share. So I think to use a certain evidence in designing buildings and also in analysing buildings, I think it's still very much relevant today. This enormous drawing behind me is definitely one of the largest in the collection. It shows a cutaway section of St Paul's Cathedral and it's over 12 feet high and nine feet wide. It was produced when the cathedral was undergoing restoration work and the draughtsman wanted to show the incredible structure of St Paul's Cathedral and it was also intended to show what architectural drawing could do. It's a real tour de force. This drawing was created by one draughtsman and it took him the best part of five years to finish it so it's an incredible testimony to his dedication and to his skill. There's amazing detail and every time that you look at it you can see more and more. One of the details that you can spot if you look very closely is Horatio Nelson's tomb in the crypt. The remarkable thing about this drawing is that it gives you a view of St Paul's that you simply can't get if you actually just go to the building itself. This drawing opens the building up, it splits it and cuts it apart so that you can get a view which is quite unique and so through drawings and plans of buildings you can actually find out more about how they're put together, how they work as a whole and why they feel as they do when we're experiencing them. What's really impressive about the Liebeskind model is its complete breaking of all the rules of architecture so it's called the spiral. If you were to unroll it you would get one long flat strip but what he's done is to zigzag it so that it stacks up on itself and forms a building completely unconventional and very radical. It's a project for the V&A itself that was never built. It was seen to be perhaps too radical, too difficult and even perhaps too awkward as a building but it still stands as one of those amazing, inspiring, revolutionary designs from the late 20th century. So we're standing here in the grand entrance of the V&A, one of those incredible spaces, a huge grand architectural statement but also a profoundly public one. You can walk straight in off the street, straight through this hall and into any of the galleries. It's an extension of the public realm. It's a proper space for everyone of London and of the world and that sense of being a museum for everyone is somehow expressed here through the architecture of the building as well. The interior is set up as a series of streets. We've got rooms which seem to evoke a sort of exterior space, a public space. The building of the V&A is a patchwork that's been added to and adapted and redesigned throughout its whole 150 year history. In the courtyard we were standing in front of the original entry and since then there's been dozens of different extensions, both historical but also contemporary. So the latest extension is the Exhibition Road extension designed by Amanda Lalit, a giant new underground gallery and most importantly a new main entrance into the museum from Exhibition Road. The opportunity that I saw was it wasn't just about designing a new gallery, a new wing for the museum. It wasn't just about looking at it as a cultural project. It was the opportunity to look at the museum as an urban project and to look at the kind of imperative, if you like, for the museum to communicate beyond its walls, to engage in contemporary life and by doing that create a much more informal way, if you like, of approaching the museum both conceptually and physically. For me the V&A is this kind of continuum from the past to the present and then a projection into the future. So while we had to have great respect for the history of the building, the heritage of the building, it was really important that we also took a radical position on what is now and what might be the future and it was that kind of searching for the equilibrium between history and modernity that I think is the success of the project. This chunk of building is an amazing survival because it dates from before the Great Fire of London. It was built in about 1599 by Sir Paul Pindar who was a very wealthy merchant and a diplomat. The building was located on Bishop's Gate and became very well known. It was seen as an example of really good craftsmanship at the time and had a very high status. It was used as a residence for the Venetian ambassador when he visited in the early 17th century. During the 18th century it had different fortunes and it became a pub. It stood until 1890 and by that point the railways were booming and there was a need to expand Liverpool Street Station. The trouble was that this building was in the way and so it was demolished but at that point someone recognised that it was a very rare example of very high quality craftsmanship and so it was actually dismantled and offered to the museum. The remarkable thing about this is that it has survived for such a long time and in various different circumstances. The building changed during its lifetime when it was standing and now it has another life as a part of this museum. This is just one example of large-scale architectural fragments which are in the Viennese collection. The museum is effectively the national collection of architecture and so it's somewhere where people can come and study architectural moments and architectural styles from the past and think about how those places and modes are still relevant today.