Victoria and Albert Museum Main Entrance
Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London

Our practice carried out several projects at the V&A as part of the museum's FuturePlan, including the Main Entrance on Cromwell Road, the Glass Gallery, Contemporary Glass Gallery, Textile Reference Collection, Leighton Exhibition, Secretariat Block, Temporary Exhibition Galleries, South-East Asian Study Rooms, Masterplan 1994-98. 

The scheme takes the form of a gentle radius and the steps merge into the slopes with a tapering stone detail. The entrance has been considerably expanded in area, allowing a much more generous approach to the museum and creating a gathering place in front of the doors. The Museum’s brief was to provide a graceful approach where disabled access would form an integral part of the design and would be used by all members of the public. The Museum also wanted to create a place where people could meet and congregate. It was important for the steps to become one of the meeting places on the London scene.

The steps and ramps are made from Shirehill sandstone with fibre-optic lighting set behind glass risers, both illuminating the Museum at night and providing lighting to the treads. The main entrance was kept operational throughout the works.

Another important early FuturePlan project was the design and deployment of a new wayfinding system, designed by Holmes Wood. The V&A's vast estate is labyrinthine, with a complicated arrangement of spaces that are notoriously hard to navigate. lt has 140 galleries, three visitor entrances, seven floors and 26 flights of stairs and lifts.

Holmes Wood's challenge was to establish a single unifying language for all the museum's spaces, which could be extended as the museum developed. They created a disciplined and simple identification system comprising banners and room numbers for galleries and pictograms for services such as lifts, shops and toilets. The solution also included a new printed map, which guides visitors to highlights as well as to all the collections and services, using the same visual vocabulary as the signs. There are few spaces within the V&A that are not display areas, so the approach had to be both sensitive and authoritative.’