V&A East

V&A East will cover two sister sites currently under construction in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. Opening at Here East in 2024, V&A East Storehouse offers a new immersive experience, taking visitors behind the scenes and providing public access to V&A collections. Opening in 2025, V&A East Museum will aim to celebrate global creativity and making, relevant to today’s world.

A collaboration team comprising of Freehaus, IDK and Studio Bergini were shortlisted to provide the 3D and 2D design services for V&A East Museum Galleries. The competition was centred around the design of the ‘Why We Make’ galleries, which will be located across two floors of the V&A East Museum. The two floors were to be sub-divided into thematic zones that juxtapose diverse practitioners and objects around shared themes and agendas, whilst collectively celebrating the transformative power of making in the face of the major issues of our time and exploring the narrative of ‘Why We Make’.

We used a wide variety of collages and visuals to develop and display our guiding principles for the overall design; spaces for cultural co-creation, layered immersion and reproduction as a form of creativity. Activation through a dynamic, central, mixed-use space of exchange, co-creation and invention, which would enrich and activate the content on display was at the heart of our approach to each gallery; as we sought to unite the entire collection.

Tags: Community