V&A East: The museum that feels like a fair and is changing the rules of the game.

The opening weeks of the new V&A East Museum in London coincided with the start of Milan Design Week, which has just come to a close: two cultural moments that represent key peaks for the international design community. Both offer an opportunity for reflection, starting from a fundamental question: what form does the cultural experience take today, and what does the public expect from it?

Within an experience economy, a lasting visual statement is not only willed for but expected. Only last month, OMA’s counterpart to New York’s original New Museum — designed by SANAA in 2007 — exploded what was an already unmissable urban presence on the edge of the Lower East Side. The extension’s angular, wedge-like form meets the new-age brief for buildings to magnetise audiences of influence: a call for people to come for the architecture, stay for the art. Dublin-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey’s new landmark for east London follows suit.

Designed as a faceted volume intended to resemble an abstracted Balenciaga garment, the latest addition to the so-called East Bank cultural quarter reads more as a stoney, pixelated version of a Louise Bourgeois spider — both sharing an innate purpose to nourish what is inside them. The brief for the building, which was commissioned in 2015, was to “design a museum that would be welcoming, distinctive and open to all”, with a particular focus on drawing in “young people”.

Unlike the spindly legs of Maman, V&A East makes its external mark with a thud. Not quite relating to the vernacular of east London — arguably impossible to pin down due to its heterogeneity — it has an assertiveness of form that suggests it might create its own. The result is a building that cannot be ignored, sitting within a context that is both unrelenting and representative. Stratford, despite its premeditated ambition to become London’s next cultural mecca, is still largely defined by its retail behemoth — the Westfields Stratford City centre. 

The mall opened in 2011 as one of the biggest shopping centres in Europe at the time. Today it stands as a microcosm of mainstream society: a carousel of attention-seeking experiences on constant rotation. The consumption of shopping and food occurring with little nuance to that of cultural consumption. It all lives noisily together.

Inside the V&A East is where this combination of spectacle and experience-turnover is given new nobility. The interiors — which unfold across five public levels containing two permanent galleries, a 900sqm temporary exhibition gallery, an event space, learning facilities, retail and a café — feel intimate and encompassing, countering the imperative of awe that is promoted by the architectural proportions of traditional institutions. Here instead, the spaces are more akin to containers that support changing and adaptive displays. In a sense, the museum moves closer to the design fair in format, able to offer up what thousands of people flock to Milan for on a yearly basis: a slice of culture and zeitgeist that offers impact, but not permanence.

The museum’s free galleries have been grouped under the name “Why We Make”, marking a focal shift away from the object to process and author. The spaces are not, in customary fashion, divided by chronological epoch, but instead grouped under what the museum calls “topical” themes, covering ideas of representation, identity, wellbeing, social justice and environmental action.

Up to 500 socially charged artefacts are held within a series of low display units that feel like movable, if pristinely detailed, furniture — many interactive and unshielded by glass. The floor-to-ceiling metal and glass displays that divide rooms and hold some of the collection’s most head-turning objects — opulent costumes glowing under perfect lighting; intricate tapestries hung against the glinting steel — resemble polished high-street shopfronts. Designed by Ja_Projects, together with A Practice for Everyday Life and Larry Achiampong, there is a literacy around creating displays for garments — likely cultivated on Ja_Projects’ work for the “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear” exhibition, which opened in 2021 at the V&A’s South Kensington campus.

The move away from the intransigence of immobile plinths, homogenous materials, and fixed layouts continues in the retail spaces, designed by Studio Mutt. Here, the richness of materials from the original V&A museum has been thoughtfully reinterpreted into a new contemporary palette, also with exquisite detailing. Timber units have been designed to be movable, able to slot together in different configurations, again speaking to a museum approach of agility and adaptiveness.

All these spaces signal the kind of spatial dexterity that is demanded by contemporary culture — a need for fast utility that is both robust and attractive. The V&A East is loud on the outside, nimble on the inside, with internal spaces that represent the culture-seeker of today: crafty and ready to be compelled, looking for stimulus in any and all formats possible.