Museums: What to Expect of the V&A’s New Sackler Courtyard

A new wing of the V&A will open this year. The Exhibition Road construction work has been underway since 2014 and is the biggest building project the site has seen for a century.

The former boiler-yard was used for staff accommodation built in the 1970’s with an original 19^th Century masonry facade. Now the site is becoming the first porcelain-tiled public courtyard in the country and will conceal the new Sainsbury Gallery, a 1,100 square metre underground exhibition space. The project was awarded to Amanda Levete Architects after a competition which saw 110 design proposals.

The Sackler Courtyard and Sainsbury Gallery

We all love the V&A garden. Whether you are studying for a PhD in Art History or you are a marketing manager from down the road, stepping into the café through the doorway marked “Better it is to gain wisdom than gold” makes you feel so much more worthy on your coffee break. The new porcelain Sackler Courtyard will provide a similar combination of precious outside space and Victorian architecture without the worry that it might be yet another school holiday with the pond full of excitable children.

There will obviously be another cafe as well.

In fact, the courtyard will expose some of the detailed decoration of the V&A building that has been hidden since its completion in 1873. It will also provide access to the Blavatnik Hall, a major new entrance expected to welcome about half of the V&A’s 3.4 million annual visitors. That will ease pressure on the current entrances on Cromwell Road and the tunnel from South Kensington tube station.

Underneath the courtyard is the Sainsbury Gallery, which is not to be confused with the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. The gallery will have no columns, allowing curators to work with a vast open space instead of the winding Victorian exhibition spaces within the museum building.

Trying to polish a timeless treasure?

We are all used to old museums attempting to modernise with cutting-edge architecture which is initially questionable in taste before becoming rapidly outdated. We don’t want Turner Prize values in an old institution just as we don’t go to a high end restaurant for a Big Mac.

A good example is the previously-mentioned Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery built in 1991 and designed by the postmodernist architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown for the collection of Renaissance paintings. An earlier tower design by the firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek in 1982 won the original competition for the new wing but was slammed by Prince Charles as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”

Architect Richard Rogers explained the difficulty was that the then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had insisted that the expansion could not rely on taxpayers’ money. That meant including offices on the site. In 1983 the Sainsbury family donated £50 million, meaning the offices were no longer needed. A new competition was launched with this new brief and was won by Venturi for a design that was much more in sympathy with the existing gallery building.

This year we have reason to be optimistic that London’s museum of decorative arts will remain just that. The porcelain square looks like it is going to be a slightly surreal yet beautiful surface to walk on while the surrounding architecture is not only preserved but open to viewing. The architects have tried to maintain the existing values and aesthetics of the historic institution. The gallery underneath will be more contemporary in style but that is understandable for an exhibition space. How do you create a space that emphasises the works of art it contains? The angles and shapes in the architect’s impression present plenty to challenge and inspire curators by giving them s something other than the cubic rooms of normal exhibition spaces. -Stewart Vickers @VickHellfire

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