Amanda Levete Picked to Design the V&A Museum's $56 Million Underground Expansion

© Amanda Levete Architects

A rendering of the winning design for the new gallery at the V&A by Amanda Levete Architects

By Coline Milliard, ARTINFO UK

Published: March 28, 2011

© Herzog and de Meuron and Hayes Davidson 2009

View from the South at dusk of the Herzog and de Meuron-designed Tate Modern expansion

© Amanda Levete Architects

View of the Amanda Levete Architects-designed courtyard at night

LONDON— The Victoria & Albert Museum in London have announced that it has selected Amanda Levete Architects as the winner of its competition to design a new underground gallery solely dedicated to temporary exhibitions. The London-based firm beat out a shortlist of six other design teams — including Britain's Jamie Fobert Architects and American firm Michael Maltzan Architecture — with a £35 million ($56 million) plan that calls for site that will be dynamically overlaid with a large courtyard featuring an irregular geometric motif that will respond to the V&A's historic façade.
One of the few female architects to have made a name for herself in a still male-dominated industry, Levete launched her design practice in 2009 after working for architect Richard Rogers in the 1980s, and later becoming a partner at Future Systems. The V&A commission "isn't just about a gallery, it's an opportunity to create a new public space for London," she told ARTINFO. "It doesn't get much better than this," she added. "I've dreamed of working on a major public and cultural project ever since I started as an architect."

Specializing for designs that emphasize organic shapes, Levete has previously attracted attention with her 2003 Selfridges shopping center in Birmingham, a dramatic example of what some have termed "blobitecture": covered with gleaming aluminum discs that form a rounded exterior, the building dominates the cityscape as something of a polished bone, perhaps an over-sized vertebra. Levete is currently working with Anish Kapoor, another fan of the shiny, bulbous form, on a joint project for the Naples subway.

The V&A's new gallery and courtyard are part of the museum's second 10-year phase of a restoration-and-redesign campaign called FuturePlans. Other projects include the creation of two furniture galleries, the redisplay of seven galleries containing European art and design from 17th to 19th centuries, and a new photography gallery.

The V&A isn't the only museum in London undergoing massive transformations. Last year, ambitious construction began at Tate Modern on a badly needed extension to help welcome the more than 5 million art lovers who come to London's iconic museum of contemporary art every year — a crush of people far exceeding the 2 million annual audience that the decade-old building was designed to accommodate. Tate Modern 2.0, still optimistically scheduled for 2012, will include a landmark building by starchitects Herzog & Meuron and have twice as much gallery space, with large areas dedicated to performance.

So far, Tate has raised just over a third of the £215 million ($345 million) needed to finish the redevelopment. At this late stage, an inauguration in time for the 2012 Olympics seems unlikely. Tate Modern's new director Chris Dercon promises to give an update on the situation soon.