London.Museums 2.

Tate Britain vs V&A extension vs Design Museum

During this first exercise, the students focused their explorations on three iconic London museums: Tate Britain, the oldest gallery in the Tate network; V&A, the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design that has recently added an extension creating a new entrance and public space; Design Museum, recently moved to a 1960´s landmark that previously housed the Commonwealth Institute.

The student draw how these buildings articulate the same program in different ways and consequently define the performance of the building. They have discovered through this process how the design of each building responded to similar challenges of circulation, scale, materiality, and identify how each building related differently to their adjacent urbanity which contribute to the creation of specific urban environments.

The studio divided itself in three groups so that each member of the team can explore respectively a specific topic for each of the three given buildings. The elements to explore dealt with tangible and intangible attributes so that the unseen essence was unveiled. The topics explored were:

1- Circulation and Flow
2- Infrastructure and Network
3- Activity and User
4- Scale and Rhythm
5- Edge and Boundary
6- Heavy and Light
7- Pattern and Time

These topics were explored through drawing. The challenge was to abstract the real building to just show the qualities of the topic the student chose to study.