In the 1850s the museum spurned the opportunity to appoint the great Gottfried Semper to design its first home. He was temporarily in London, following an enforced Parisian exile after he unwisely took part with his friend Richard Wagner in the revolution in Dresden in 1849. He was lured by Edwin Chadwick with the prospect of commissions for crematoria to dispose of bodies of cholera victims, Semper being considered an expert on that building type. Chadwick played an important part in creating what became the V&A after the Great Exhibition of 1851, even arranging for Semper to have an audience with Prince Albert, most of whose cousins back in Germany would have preferred to see him executed.

What eventually arose on the South Kensington site came from the pen of Sir Aston Webb, purveyor of pomposity to British institutions at the fin de siècle that exuded Imperialist confidence but were already harbouring the seeds of their own downfall. He designed the east (public) front of Buckingham Palace with its famous balcony; the Admiralty Arch, control point for the supposedly all conquering Royal Navy, itself about to receive its comeuppance at the Battle of Jutland; the campus of Birmingham University, as magnificent in its own way as the political and public career of its founder and the city’s great champion Joseph Chamberlain, and, of course, the V&A. In respect of the latter’s curatorial conundrums, Sir Aston’s design presented no obvious solutions or even piquant hints, a situation which generations of directors, from droopy mustachioed Sir Roy Strong to the present incumbent, historian and Labour politician Tristram Hunt (who preferred exile at the V&A to serving under Jeremy Corbyn), have tried to rectify.

Hence the ‘mixed bag’ of its architecture, ranging from Sir Aston’s confection to the repurposed, prefabricated iron-structured Boilerhouse for the Crystal Palace, re-sited in Bethnal Green as the museum of childhood. A couple of decades ago it acquired a strange addition, a rectilinear box spreading across its front in complete denial of the nave-and-aisles axial character of the original, and decorated with a pattern of tessellated tiles that Adam Caruso of its architects Caruso St John, explained to one writer as reflecting their interest in an obscure 19th century architect and theorist of whom the writer would never have heard called Gottfried Semper. The writer had been discussing Semper in public for nearly 20 years.

There was also an attempt in the mid-1990s to create a ‘Bilbao effect’ in South Kensington with a large extension by the then fashionable Daniel Libeskind. Despite evincing the only recorded public statement about architecture from then prime minister John Major, who ‘hoped it would be a triumph for the British construction industry’, but didn’t ‘know enough about it to comment, sadly’, it died a death, failing to attract Lottery funding despite obtaining planning permission.

One modestly glowing lamp in this gloom is the substantial entrance and temporary exhibition gallery designed a decade ago by Amanda Levete. It added a much-needed facility to the museum which had put too many of its temporary exhibitions, of varying quality and popularity, in dreary basement galleries.

V&A East, a bunker for contemporary culture, London College of Fashion to the right, and interesting tower block behind to the left, from the bridge to the Olympic Stadium. Photo: Hufton + Crow

And so to the East Bank, a slice of the 2012 Olympic Park, renamed for her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and devoted to culture. With Sadlers Wells Theatre, the BBC, the London College of Fashion (part of the highly regarded University of the Arts London) and the V&A – which bagged two nearby plots – it represents a concatenation of cultural activity rivalling established sites in London, such as South Kensington, the South Bank and the Barbican. UCL has taken a big site for its east London campus nearby. The Olympic Stadium, repurposed for a failing soccer team, is also close; all can be reached fairly easily from Stratford Station, which has international, national and city-wide train services in addition to Underground and local bus services.

One of the V&A sites, slightly distant from East Bank, accommodates the Storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro and opened last year. As explained in WAFN at the time, it is a veritable triumph, a stimulating response to the ongoing dilemmas faced by almost all curators of large collections, as well as those posed by the V&A’s motley collection (the national repository for everything, except antiquities which go to the British Museum, old master paintings and drawings which go to the National Gallery, and modern and British art which goes to Tate).

So by default the V&A has those elements of material culture which used to be considered inferior to the ‘Great Works’ but includes design, fashion, architecture and furniture, recently expanded to include performance – all arguably more relevant to contemporary audiences than buttoned up maidens reading letters by windows. DSR place the artefacts on wire racks, as if in a depot, but create a series of walkways at various levels meaning almost all can be seen by visitors, choosing their route to see objects that interest them. With QR code enabled labels, they can obtain more information than conventional captions could convey. By allowing visitors to ‘curate’ their own experience it avoids the controversial sense of ‘authority’ that conventional curation has, while also allowing a far greater proportion of the collection to be visible.

Section AA annoted: section through the building

The second V&A building, V&A East, sits at one end of a row of cultural institutions collectively called East Bank, as they overlook one of the many small waterways in the park that ultimately flow into the Thames. The default position of the other buildings in the row, the London College of Fashion, the BBC and Sadler’s Wells is a form of ‘polite modern’, a sort of constrained minimalism beloved by a certain type of British architect.

Site Plan

Here, we are told, the V&A will address . . . the contemporary. Long associated with penumbral displays of often frequently historic artefacts in its South Kensington home, V&A East, with its groovy east London vibe and psycho-geographical trace of the 2012 Olympics, will nurture that sacred cow of modern museum curators: new audiences. And Irish architects O’Donnell & Tuomey break the ‘polite modern’ mould with their design for V&A East. If it has a precedent: it is Rem Koolhaas’ Casa de Musica in Oporto, resembling a meteorite crashing into the ground. But where Koolhaas follows this idea through, O’Donnell and Tuomey treat the meteorite almost as if it were a lunar landing module, spawning diagonal legs to soften its fall and prevent too much of a mess on the ground. It is a rather odd effect, torn between being a hermetic object and one which opens at its feet to welcome visitors. The sense of strangeness continues in what can only be described as ungainly massing, whose rationale is not visible from the outside and which fails to evoke any curiosity. It is clad in aggressively angled tiles which follow the inclines of the openings.

Close up of the aggressively angled tiles of the façade

All in all, it recalls the sort of compositional trap into which talented architects sometimes fall, of coming up with a visual motif and gradually whittling away at it so that it appears, at least to its progenitors, to self-justify. To be fair, one might recall that the purpose of this building is to present the new and challenging, drawing both on the museum’s collection and contemporary culture, especially of the area around it, with specially curated exhibitions and specially commissioned art. ‘Polite modern’ would hardly be appropriate to that, but even so the row of buildings along East Bank (the others have party walls because of adjustments to the winning masterplan for the site) seems collectively not to advance the notion of architecture-for-cultural-institutions beyond where it reached in the 1960s, when art was housed in bunkers like the South Bank Centre, New York’s Lincoln Center or Washington’s Kennedy Center. Given the resource available it is a shame that this mould was not challenged, though once infected there is no known cure for the ‘polite modern’ virus.

Circulation studies: Circulation study through the museum

Some visitors will no doubt approach from the walkway on the waterside of the building, though I wager that a good number (as I did) will approach from a service road to the rear, which carries the bus route from Stratford. If so, your first impression of the building is a loading bay which you walk around to the ludicrously named ‘Waterside Square’ – it is not a square, the water is rather lower than the surface, and it lacks any sense of urbanity, though there are notices about ‘700 new homes’ to come and a promise of better landscaping – to penetrate the building’s perimeter between the diagonal legs.

The narrow entrance hall with café

The entrance is also underwhelming. It is rather small and narrow, (quite unlike the Storehouse’s almost understated grandeur and enticing vistas) with the inevitable café at one end and a staircase at the other, with lifts straight ahead. The displays are on three upper floors, and a terrace on top which shares the floor with more display space.

An awkward staircase links the various level

This, as well as the scale of the building, recalls MVRDV’s Depot in Rotterdam, but against that V&A East is disappointing. In Rotterdam the views are wider and more inviting, revealing the city’s skyline, as the terrace covers much of the building: in London, the terrace is confined to a relatively small part of the building footprint and looks not to central London but over the less eye-catching East and South London.

Building corner 3d façade study

The gallery spaces could make up for this disappointment, but only through the quality of displays rather than any inherent qualities of the galleries themselves. In reality, these spaces are, perhaps inevitably given the brief, generically ordinary. They are also constrained by the building’s size so are not large enough to impress with their volume, or with striking exhibition design and object placement. Still, no doubt imaginative curators and exhibition designers could do something with them. In their first iteration there is an exhibition called ‘The Music is Black’, a welcome reflection of a long running trend..

Annotated plan, level 4

Annotated plan, level 3

Annotated plan, level 2

Annotated plan, level 1

The two lower display floors show a hodge-podge of objects from the collection and special commissions supposedly exploring various aspects of ‘creativity’. Like ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’, it is a word overuse of which has rendered into a cliché. One valid theme, though, is the contribution of collaboration to any creative activity, whether it is East End artists living in communal squats or the Bloomsbury Group, whose unconventional domestic arrangements generally depended on substantial private incomes. The problem here, which is a real dilemma for curators working with an institution like the V&A, is whether to identify themes and then select or commission objects to illuminate them, or simply to concentrate on the objects themselves.

Dress worn by Beyonce in the ‘why we make gallery’, designed by JA Projects. Photo: Hufton + Crow

A few objects stand out because they are compelling in themselves, such as Aalto’s armchair for the Paimio Sanitorium – in a scanty display about design for healing – and a dress once worn by Beyoncé, a striking object.

V&A East’s intentions are laudable, to make culture more appealing to young generations. In particular, the ‘grounding’ in locally produced culture is appropriate and could be compelling, especially if effectively compared and contrasted with ‘the best thoughts recorded in the most sophisticated objects’, or however one might describe the traditional view of culture. But where the Storehouse seems effectively to merge architectural and curatorial ideals, that cannot be said of V&A East, to the detriment of what it offers in terms of architecture, spectacle and visitor experience.