At London’s V&A East Museum, architecture learns from Balenciaga

The term ‘Olympicopolis’ came about as a descendant to the 19th century nickname ‘Albertopolis’ – a moniker for west London’s cultural quarter, where its most significant cultural institutions are filed side-by-side. These cultural colossi gather on Exhibition Road and include the original Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), which opened to the public in 1857 as the Museum of Manufactures, later expanding and changing its name. Olympicopolis extends this cultural catchment, pulling it across the city from west to east London. In 2015, an international design competition was launched to develop the Stratford Waterfront cultural and education district. The winning bid included the appointment of O’Donnell + Tuomey to shape V&A’s second home in London. Their design would evolve within the new district in Stratford—previously a culturally fallow land, specifically selected to host the 2012 London Olympics to ignite a predicated chain reaction of regeneration. The area held large expanses of available estate close to central London, with good connections inwards. The name ‘Olympicopolis’ eventually converted to the ‘East Bank Cultural Quarter’, and like South Kensington before it, became an intentional hotspot for buildings of culture.

Ten years after the competition launch, Olympicopolis’ emerging objectives have taken solid form: Sadler’s Wells East opened in 2025 and the London College of Fashion’s Stratford Campus just before it in 2023, along with UCL’s East campus. The Storehouse for V&A East—designed by New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro—opened on 31 May 2025, almost a year before O’Donnell + Tuomey’s museum doors will unlatch to the public.

The V&A East will therefore sit in a zone of contrived cultural activity—resembling many regeneration super-plans before and after it, in London and beyond. The building becomes just one node in a system designed purposefully to spark zeitgeist. Stratford’s development is already a significant young author in London’s changing morphology, kneading the capital’s cultural community outwards and capturing more of its variety and polyglottic character. While occupying its role within this larger cultural constellation, the intention for the V&A East Museum has been to create ‘a new kind of museum space, rooted in East London’. O’Donnell + Tuomey have approached the project as a question into the reflexive role of institutional buildings.

John Tuomey, co-founder of the Irish firm, explained how the design explored “the question of identity,” and how to “embody the idea of the museum in an expressive form; how to enclose the interior contents in a protective exterior”. The team found solutions in the influence of Cristóbal Balenciaga, the Spanish couturier who was celebrated in a major V&A exhibition in 2017, drawing attention to his use of the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’, or ‘the space in between’. The practice cites Balenciaga’s tailoring as a sculptural sense of space between body and garment—an approach of framing rather than restricting the figure. Translating apparel to architecture, Tuomey describes working with “pencil drawings and cardboard models” on the V&A’s form, “like tailors shaping the line of a garment until we found the right fit—imagining the façade as a protective architecture, suggesting a sense of space between the body and the enclosing fabric”.

Within the simulated outer folds, the design also looks to explore different permeations of openness. Its five storeys are built around a central core with open stairways connecting different areas together. Galleries lead from one to another in an open sequence, urging visitors to explore the entire building from the public space to the roof terrace. Two public entrances—one from the upper podium level, connecting the building to the broader East Bank development, and one from ground level linking to the public square along the waterfront—expand on this prompted freewheeling circulation.

Like the cultural quarter itself, the façade’s translation from fashion to form gives more authority to a creative concept and institutional gravitas rather than place, the latter arguably becoming substitutable. The first V&A museum building, which was purpose-built in the 1890s after years using temporary existing buildings to house its collection, also made its impression through external expression. Opened in 1909, Aston Webb’s façade stretched approximately 220 metres along Cromwell Gardens, with a combination of red brick and Portland stone forming the recognisable Edwardian museum front that so many visitors have stepped in and out of.

Over a century later, O’Donnell + Tuomey’s faceted façade will be built in precast concrete, pigmented with natural sand with visible stone particles, using 491 unique, interlocking pieces in two-metre bandwidths to make its mark. Its contribution to Olympicopolis speaks to the well-rehearsed notion that cultural creation requires visual ceremony—its folds a call for culture seekers to venture east.