ARCHITECTS BUILD SMALL SPACES AT THE V&A

Text & Photography:  Shermeen Beg

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. When the latest exhibition entitled ‘1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces’ claimed to intersperse these structures within the existing fabric of the museum, naturally I had to go see firsthand. The curators realized what we architects have always known; architecture is not about drawings, models or photographs, but about experiencing a space. By placing these structures and allowing people to walk through them, touch them and almost inhabit them, the audience engaged with the actual buildings. The official press release states “Using the landscape of the V&A as a test site, the V&A invited 19 architects to submit proposals for structures that examine notions of refuge and retreat. From these 19 concept submissions, seven were selected for construction at full scale.” The successful teams consisted of Rural Studio from Newbern Alabama USA, Vazio S/A Belio Horizonte from Brazil, Sou Fujimoto Architects and Terunobu Fuimori from Tokyo Japan, Studio Mumbai Architects from Mumbai India, Helen & Hard Architects and Rintala Eggertsson Architects from Norway.