Building V&A East: the engineering behind London’s striking new museum

Questions will abound when people first clap eyes on the multi-faceted building-cum-sculpture that’s been conjured into existence on the bank of the River Lea in east London.

The world-famous V&A has spawned two new outposts: a storehouse for the portion of its vast collection not on display, and this eye-catching new structure. The museum is rooted in east London with a global outlook, celebrating the processes of making and creativity for a changing world.

V&A East Museum, as it’s known, has three galleries, two dedicated to permanent free collections, and one to temporary exhibitions. Like all good museums, this one has a café-restaurant and a shop.

How was the V&A East designed?

From a distance the museum has the appearance of concrete origami, inspired by post-war Brutalism with a sci-fi update, perhaps. But talk to any member of the design team and they’ll eagerly enquire: “Do you know about the Balenciaga dress?”

Cristóbal Balenciaga was a pioneer of haute couture in the 1950s and 60s, exerting huge influence on the generations of clothing designers who shaped women’s fashion in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Balenciaga was admired for breaking conventions and his pioneering use of structure, pattern-cutting and shaping – creating elegantly minimal dresses through intricate fabric ‘engineering’. Throughout the 1970s the V&A built up the largest collection of his work in the UK.

Architects O’Donnell + Tuomey were inspired first by the puffed sleeve in ‘Woman writing a letter, with her Maid’, a painting by celebrated Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Partner John Tuomy reportedly wondered what it would be like to be inside that sleeve. He said it evoked the Japanese concept of ma, the space between a structure and a body.

The next flash of inspiration struck when Tuomey saw an X-ray image of a technically sophisticated 1954 Balenciaga evening dress. It revealed complicated folding, layering and internal support, and the interplay between body and enveloping form. 

Their proposal gave rise to a host of exciting (competition-winning) architectural ideas: 

• Connect the V&A’s architectural identity with its fashion scholarship.
• Create an arresting but elegant exterior underlain by sophisticated engineering.
• Create a geometric façade echoing the layered, tensile, and volumetric qualities seen in the X ray.
• Achieve visual effect using the fabric of the building itself, rather than through applied decoration.
• Internally, create interstitial spaces that celebrate the museum’s structure and visitor circulation routes.

How the engineers prioritised sustainability

Sustainability, building systems, façade and structure are the key interwoven threads of this project – all tackled by Buro Happold. The firm of engineers is responsible not just for this building, but for all four across the Stratford Waterfront development. They’ve been involved in V&A East since 2015, when the winning design was announced.

Buro Happold sustainability director, Nancy Wood, explains that the brief was to create “a world-class building for a world-class collection”, as well as to achieve “world-leading environmental performance”. This interplay between stretching sustainability goals and creating the avant-garde architectural design was project-defining, she says. 

In 2016, there was dawning awareness that carbon is closely linked with materials, energy, water, transport, construction, maintenance and operational activities… and cost. Efficiencies in each of those areas delivered reductions in carbon. 

The project team flipped the equation: setting a stretching target for carbon savings would push every discipline to seek out efficiencies. The project was visionary, at that point in time, in targeting a 15% reduction in emissions arising from construction, and 35% from operating the museum once it opened.

“Ten years ago, what we were aiming for was well outside the norm,” recalls Wood. “Achieving those targets required the whole team to seek out different ways of doing things.”

In a nod to the “aggregation of marginal gains” philosophy that had propelled British athletes to medal-winning success in the 2012 Games, the team chased down its environmental and carbon targets on multiple fronts.

Innovative climate control to protect exhibits

To protect sensitive exhibits, museum curators traditionally require stable and controlled temperatures, humidity and light levels. Designers usually respond by working to achieve fixed settings. It’s a strategy that places unrelenting demand on heating and ventilation systems, resulting in high energy bills and carbon emissions.

Here, Buro Happold proposed a more efficient approach. “The whole MEP (mechanical, electrical and public health) strategy has been designed around modern rate-of-change criteria,” explains Damian Wines, Buro Happold’s MEP director. “Instead of fixed temperature and humidity setpoints, our client and their stakeholders agreed to accommodate variations in temperature and humidity, providing the rate of change over any 24 hours wasn’t too rapid.”

Wines says that throughout the year the museum’s temperature will range by about nine degrees. 

“Even over the course of a day you’re seeing energy and carbon savings, because you’re not having to heat or cool and dehumidify as much in response to changing weather. Over the course of a week, and between seasons, the benefits become substantial.”

The rate of change strategy is bolstered by division of the museum’s interior into environmental zones. These provide stepped transitions between fluctuating outdoor conditions and the more stable conditions of the galleries themselves.

Zoning allowed heating, cooling and ventilation effort to be concentrated in the galleries and cafe, where it is most needed, and relaxed in the entrance and circulation routes, where it was not. 

Real time sensors and smart controls tune operation of the museum’s heating, cooling and air handling system to the changing conditions and needs of each zone. Zones can be shut down entirely when required – for example, during changes in the temporary exhibition gallery.

A lot of effort went into sourcing a chiller system with an exceptionally high coefficient of performance. “We really pushed it,” says Wines, “taking into account the chiller’s seasonal efficiency.” Chillers only operate under peak load – the hottest hours of the hottest days – for 1% of the time, he explains, and they are not equally efficient across their range. “Instead of aiming for maximum efficiency at peak cooling, we focused on optimising mid-range performance.” 

Ventilation is essential to keep visitors comfortable. But in many buildings fresh air is often over-supplied, wasting energy both in unnecessary air circulation, and in lost heat or cooling. V&A East’s ventilation system allows for the air exchange rate to be varied in line with visitor numbers. Heat exchangers on the air handling units recover an impressive 80% of thermal energy. 

A high performance façade to minimise heat

Creating an airtight envelope, snug insulation and careful control of glazing were equally important parts of the energy and carbon reduction strategy. “We pushed for very low G- and U-values,” says Wood. These measure how much thermal energy passes through the building’s fabric, affecting rates of heat loss and gain.

From afar, V&A East looks like it has been hewn from a monolithic block, but get closer and you discover that its surface is traced by an intricate geometry of intersecting lines. It appears to be panelled or tiled. This patterning hides the joints between huge precast concrete panels: all are 2 metres in height and 21 centimetres thick; the largest of them is 12 metres wide.

The panels’ size is important for airtightness: there are few joints relative to the museum’s overall surface area. And within each joint there are outer and inner silicone beads. “One alone is enough to create an impermeable seal; the second is insurance,” says Buro Happold façades director Peter Goff.

Daylight is unwelcome in most museums, causing exhibits to fade and degrade, and generating unwanted heat. The concrete panels create an ideal gallery environment. And yet, the V&A wanted some windows, to give views across East Bank and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The question was how much glazing to provide.

A technique known as parametric modelling was used to decide how large the windows should be. The design team created a digital model of the museum, allowing a degree of flexibility in its ultimate form, within set limits or parameters. A full year’s worth of sunshine data was then run through the model – sunrise, sunset, angle, intensity – alongside historic weather data, future climate projections, and a range of visitor scenarios. It enabled the team to assess the depth of daylight penetration into the museum, and the potential effects of light levels and glare on exhibits and visitors alike.

To keep solar heat gain to a minimum and block harmful UV wavelengths, the windows use a high-performance laminated and coated glass.

Creating its hardworking structure

It may surprise that such a massive-looking building is held up by a steel frame. Inside the museum, visitors see parts of it, but not all. The structural elements doing the hardest work, and requiring the greatest engineering focus, are hidden from view. 

“One of the architect’s early concept drawings showed a car suspended in the air,” says Buro Happold structures associate Matthew Duckett. “The galleries are designed for high imposed loads, and hanging points are installed at regular intervals on the undersides of the beams, each capable of supporting up to 6 tonnes.”

Large diameter circular hollow section (CHS) tubes follow the museum’s ascending vertical and diagonal lines. They support deep section steel I-beams that take some of the horizontal load imposed on the columns by the building’s geometry.

The beams work compositely with floor slabs of hollow reinforced concrete “biscuits” topped with cast in situ reinforced concrete, providing both light weight and strength.

The tubular columns spring, at ground level, from complex welded steel “nodes”. Every node is different. Columns rise at different angles. Different nodes have different numbers of columns – up to five.

Working out the nodes’ geometry required painstaking care; building them perhaps even more so. The CHS tubes are 45.7 centimetres in diameter, with wall thicknesses up to 4 centimetres. “There was close collaboration with Bourne, the steelwork contractor, on fabrication and buildability,” says Duckett. Cutting, assembly and welding had to be precise to ensure correct alignment in the superstructure above.

Bourne produced the steelwork offsite. Columns were delivered in sections, with robustly fabricated steel “splices” at each end that enabled them to be bolted together and then welded for additional strength.

The tubular columns support the façade panels. At 2-metre height intervals on every column were welded stubby square hollow section brackets or, in many locations, square hollow section beams spanning between columns. Panels were cast with reinforced corbels – protruding blocks – designed to rest on the brackets/beams. To keep them securely in place in the face of vibration, wind loading or sudden shocks, they were fastened with stainless steel bolts – but it’s the corbels and brackets/beams that are doing the real work.

Next year, the original V&A in South Kensington will celebrate its 170th birthday. All buildings and structures are designed with a notional minimum service life, and V&A East Museum’s is a pretty standard 60 years. But the build quality, combined with its design for flexibility in its future use, should see it lasting well beyond that time horizon. “It’s going to be here for 100, perhaps 200 years or more,” says Nancy Wood.