Young V&A’s architectural overhaul is striking and joyful

Receive free Architecture updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Architecture news every morning.

The building that houses Young V&A at Bethnal Green is a kind of architectural missing link, the dinosaur bones of modern British architecture. Its iron structure was part of the museum which was set up on the V&A’s South Kensington site and was moved out east to Bethnal Green in 1872, where for almost a century it housed collections from animal products and rococo art to the beginnings of a children’s museum, a mission which was concretised by V&A director Roy Strong in the early 1970s.

Since then, this vast structure, seemingly overscaled for the children and the exhibits it aimed to accommodate, has been a fixture on the London scene, particularly for parents struggling to exhaust their offspring during half-term breaks. An incredible free resource in which the exhibits were, frankly, always second to the sand pits, it has now undergone a £13mn redesign (all raised from donations) to striking and joyful effect.

It looks not much different from the street, with only a new arched iron gate announcing the new work. Architects Caruso St John’s slightly stiff and self-conscious frontage (new in 2007) remains, but there has been a radical reimagination inside. Architects De Matos Ryan have undertaken the changes to the building while AOC Architecture have designed the fit-out and displays, the former with a subtle, clean clarity, the latter with explosive abandon. The blend of the cool cast iron and the vivid supergraphics and colour is cartoonishly exuberant.

The original skylight running the length of the vaulted roof has been opened up and illuminates the monochrome marble mosaic floor, laid by women prisoners in the 19th century, which now looks cool and clean, if a little haunted by its history. The former clutter of shop, sandwich bar and ramps has been stripped out to create a generous and elegant internal piazza. At the end, a spiral stair wraps around a kaleidoscopic mirror, a feature inspired by the museum’s optical collection and through a lengthy process of collaboration with children who, it seems, wanted to see themselves reflected and distorted, the users animating the feature. If it looks a little inaccessible (only for able-bodied users), I suppose the museum could blame the underaged focus groups.

The display spaces have been shaken up, livened up and brightened up. The Imagine gallery, aimed at slightly older children, encourages story-making and telling in an overarching (and, I’d suggest, overthought and overwrought) effort but also enables the display of some of the wealth of toys and games in the museum’s collection, from a Syrian rattle made around 2300BC to Star Wars figures.

A room of dolls’ houses is hypnotically wonderful, the obsessively miniaturised details of their contents representing and reinforcing a hierarchy of class, etiquette and wealth. They are supplemented here by Rachel Whiteread’s “Place (Village)”, an eerily memorable installation of mostly home-made dolls’ houses collected from the scrap heap, illuminated and piled high in a darkened room. The scraps of real wallpapers in the interiors resemble those of houses about to be demolished, a poignant memorial to care, amateurism and dreams of lost childhoods. 

The biggest change is the Design section. Bridging the territory between the design-focused South Kensington museum and the playful Bethnal Green building, it introduces visitors to high-end, eye-catching design from a Memphis shelf to a De Stijl highchair. Employing the whole breadth of the V&A’s collection from fashion and materials to masks and movie costumes, this is museum-as-taster-menu but also an opportunity to create curatorial free associations. There are superhero prosthetics and space-hoppers, disco boots and Deco make-up mirrors, pedal cars and samurai armour. Radical architectural drawings are smuggled in beside dolls’ houses. A large new temporary exhibition gallery is a space of stunning clarity, a long vault with a hint of the Victorian drill hall or grand station about it, as well as a foreshadowing of British high-tech modernism. It will open in October with a show on Japanese anime. 

Every space here has been used carefully and thoughtfully. From a newly created stage (replete with red carpet) to the giant letters which turn out to have reading nooks built into them, nothing is wasted. It could have been too self-consciously wacky, the migraine beat of kids TV or a hyperactive interactive playscape. But it has kept its cool and instead looks like a gateway drug to the parent museum, an idea that these things are there for our enjoyment, for free — and there is always plenty more. More open, public and enjoyable than ever, it looks like a whole load of fun.

Young V&A reopens on July 1, vam.ac.uk/young