In 1996 the architect’s description of his winning Victoria and Albert Museum Boilerhouse proposal left BD bewildered

Date 1996
Location Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington
Architect Daniel Libeskind

As Dixon Jones’s characteristically polite and in-keeping Exhibition Road scheme is completed, BD returns to a rather less contextual proposal for the area, in the form of Daniel Libeskind’s winning entry to the Victoria and Albert Museum Boilerhouse extension competition.

His contorted cubist concoction beat entries from a host of luminaries, including Foster, Grimshaw, Hopkins and Zaha, but his project description left BD somewhat baffled.

“The labyrinth of discovery is the organisational leitmotiv mediating between the existing galleries and the museum and new programme requirements,” he wrote. The dynamic interlocking forms would create “a microcosm of the multi-faceted order of the museum and a gateway to the history of the decorative arts”.

The new galleries for the permanent collection in the extension’s upper level, meanwhile, were apparently to be “an interactive field of continuum”, the extension representing “the last chord of a symphony”. A symphony that ended somewhat abruptly when the project was abandoned in 2004.