When traveling, there is always a place or event that far exceeds expectations and makes a trip far more noteworthy. Overshadowed by so many other museums and attractions in the culturally-packed city, V&A is that place. The Victoria and Albert Museum (named after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, abbreviated as the V&A), located in the London borough of Kensington, is said to be the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects in 145 galleries. Founded in 1852, its collection spans 5,000 years of design, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewellery, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
Architecture Gallery
The Architecture gallery in the V&A Museum is especially important (well, maybe just to me) because it is the UK's only permanent Architecture gallery, including a major partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The gallery is divided on three principles: moments of conception, idea of function and use, and exploration into style and aesthetics. What makes this gallery so unique to me is the focus on process and 'conception' in architecture, which display those early stages of development that are so crucial and unique in the design practice. The gallery includes process sketches and drawings accessed through pullout drawers, plus accompanied study models, along with their finalized counterparts, to numerous significant projects in the last few centuries. You can see a video of the Curator of Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Abraham Thomas, discuss the Architecture gallery here.
The partnership with RIBA allows the gallery to produce temporary exhibits that deal with contemporary culture and ideas in London and throughout the world, along with lectures and conversations with current leading scholars and designers. What caught my eye was a symposium held at the V&A Museum in 2009, entitled "Sustaining Identity: Symposium II", which focused on the resistance to the icon and incorporation of local identity in architectural design. A review of the symposium was published in the V&A Online Journal (Issue no.3, spring 2011), entitled "Not quite Vegemite: An architectural resistance to the icon" by Ian Tocher.
“Is there an architecture of resistance that stands in the face of commercial globalisation: that rejects the iconic image; that celebrates the spirit of individual place?”
The event was centered around what cultural organization UNESCO coined as ‘whole life sustainability', or architecture to ‘incorporate local identity into the design process'. UNESCO argues that the idea of sustainable architecture should be widened to include the way a building relates to its social, cultural and geographic situation. Major architects from around the world - the USA, Chile, South Africa, Australia, Finland, the UK, Spain, India - provided case studies of architecture that related to their local contexts. The key-note speaker, Finish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, criticized much of today’s architecture as ‘mere representation' with no substance to relate to the local context.
Courtyard at the V&A Museum
This symposium seems to have addressed an important issue in contemporary architecture, but a clear definition of what exactly 'sustaining identities' means in architectural practice is still far from clear. Tocher states, "It was noticeable that while many speakers criticised the proliferation of computer-designed, so-called ‘iconic’ buildings throughout the world, plonked down in our cities without any thought to their context, no-one seemed prepared to give any specific examples. Sean Godsell made a useful point - anything has got the potential to become iconic – he gave the example of the Australian savoury spread, Vegemite – but, he argued, architects should not deliberately set out to create an icon, that will only lead to stupid buildings".
“Today’s fashionable architecture seeks to seduce our eye but it rarely contributes to the integrity and meaning of its setting”