Productora's VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

from the architects:

As part of the exhibition 'Architecture 2010' 18 architectural studios were invited to submit a concept design for a full-scale structure to be built at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, of which seven will be realized.

The proposed installation consists of two black angular elements, placed on the staircase that leads towards the landing of the Architectural Gallery. We wanted to create an experience in which you are never really inside nor outside, but rather continuously ‘on the way’ through the object—to propose an architecture where the movement by the perceiver constructs the space. Therefore the staircase seemed the ideal spot for an intervention: we wanted the visitors to notice this area (which is normally never ‘programmed’), to consider it as a space that can provoke you and generate a direct formal and spatial experience.

It is important to notice that the experience generated is also a physical one: the moment when you turn and change direction on these staircases a moment of imbalance is produced. In the centre of the installation, you find yourself in between the treads leading up towards the sharp angle between the black polished walls, and -on the other side- the steps going down towards the opposite angle. The proposed walls generate dead ends and detours, allowing the stairs to become aesthetic objects instead of functional devices: forms that generate amazement instead of being just an object to use. The two black angular elements eliminate the linear reading of the staircase and turn it into a space on itself; they obstruct its mere functional essence and turn it into a enchanted object.

Productora.