London.Museum Extension.

Victoria & Albert Museum vs Tate Modern Museum

Students focused their research by looking at two museums that have extended their spaces in the recent years : the V&A with the Amanda Levete project and Tate Modern with the Herzog de Meuron project.

The location of these museums is both within cultural hubs, one in the core of South Kensington and the other in the Southbank riverside. They are important landmarks that attract many local and international visitors. Students are invited to look into the architectural strategies of how the extensions of these museums, these new projects, aim for specific dialogue between the historic building and the new extension at the architectural scale, and dialogue with their adjacent context and dynamics of the district. In a quick glace, we can see how the V&A extension opted for a contrast in aesthetic and materiality that frames a new entrance to the museum whilst the Tate Modern extension retained a continuity materially but sought contracts and identity formally.

Students explored how these spaces create different urban conditions for the variety of users and activities within them and around them, bringing culture and community together.

The aim is to abstract the complexity that weaves the urban fabric, including buildings and public realm, through their physical and material qualities as well as their intangible and performative qualities of the users and the environment. The urban learnings will reveal how the designs react to similar challenges, for instance of circulation and scale in their specific urban setting. To do this, the studio is divided into two groups so that each member of the team can focus one specific topic in the three different sites. The topics to explore are the following:

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

The drawing explorations intend to represent the tangible and intangible pair of topics to capture the essence of the place. The challenge is to produce two main drawings. First a mapping of the site that shows the chosen parameters of the topic and its behaviour on site; the second drawing, is a discovery or interest that is observed and extracted from the first drawing exploration. A physical model follows this study to conclude the mapping narrative into an object that represents the essence of the performance of the topic on site.