An arched passage is cut through a hemicone, one that is half finished in reddish timber boarding, half in a painted imitation of richly veined green marble. Part ancient tomb, part wigwam, part child’s building block, this portal is geometrically grand but dimensionally modest. It leads to something called the Mini Museum, a space intended for very young children, which also features pebbly and tiled floors and walls, a tunnel covered in fake turf, and pillars wrapped in mirrored mosaic and iridescent leatherette, all set against a dignified Victorian backdrop of slender cast iron columns and park-facing, timber-framed windows.
A low bench is attached to the half cone, finished in actual marble that looks so much like the painted version that you may not notice. A white bust of a young woman, also marble, skilfully carved in Rome in 1863, stands in a glass case strangely close to the ground. It’s strange, that is, unless you’re three years or so old, in which case it relates perfectly to the level of your eye.
This place is serious and playful at once, sophisticated and direct. Cognoscenti may spot references to the postmodernist architects Hans Hollein (of Vienna) and Michael Graves (of Princeton). The game of real and fake marble is something you find in Bavarian baroque churches of 300 years ago. The space works with qualities that architects learn about in college – scale, materials, light, form. The target audience, meanwhile, won’t know what the word “architecture” means, but they’ll probably respond to the touch of the many different surfaces, to the glitter and colour, to the climbable and crawlable constructions.
All of which sums up the spirit of the Young V&A, formerly the Museum of Childhood, an institution in Bethnal Green, east London, which has just undergone a £13m makeover. It wants to involve and engage children. At the same time, as part of the Victoria and Albert Museum empire, which includes the famous mothership in London’s South Kensington, its museum in Dundee and forthcoming buildings in the former Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, it wants to live up to high cultural ambitions.
Two very different architectural practices are involved. One, De Matos Ryan, who previously decluttered the historic buildings of York Theatre Royal, have performed a similar job on the museum’s Victorian iron-framed building. They have let more light in from above and made it easier to see out through its large existing windows. The museum’s big central hall is now brighter and whiter and emptier than before, with a twisty staircase at the end opposite the entrance, shaped like an elegant helter-skelter, acting as a magnet to draw people through the building. Their work is refined and monochrome, with touches of controlled drama.
The other practice, AOC, authors of the recent School Green Centre in Shinfield, Berkshire, working with the designers Graphic Thought Facility, have filled the decks on either side of the hall with a riot of colours, shapes and letters. Their installations prompt associations: there’s a red velvety room like an old-fashioned theatre, with a stepped stage; also mini warehouses in a section devoted to design, and a street made out of some of the museum’s collection of doll’s houses. There’s fun with scale: words such as “play” and “exhibition” are spelled out with very large letters, while pieces of architecture are undersized.
Working closely with children from the nearby Bangabandhu and Globe primary schools and Morpeth secondary school, the architects have made some of their ideas real – for example, a Japanese print of a woman at a dressing table looking at self-portraits prompted a child to propose an actual table at which visitors could draw themselves, which has duly been installed. This is genuine “co-creation”, as the museum call it, rather than a box-ticking consultation exercise.
There are some hazards in the makeover project. The old Museum of Childhood engaged children effectively by presenting an entrancing array of historic toys simply and directly, and there was a danger that the new version would put too many layers of curatorship and design between objects and visitor – that its notions of play would be overly prescribed and managed.
There are moments, as when a sign instructs you to “Be more curious” and “Get experiencing”, that come close to such overdirection. I’d also question whether the change to the old name, which said what was in the tin, enhances engagement and accessibility. But the great thing is that there are as many objects now – about 2,000 – as there were previously. They now include, what’s more, beautiful items from the V&A’s collections that were made by and for adults – that white marble bust; a piece of furniture by the celebrated Milanese design collection Memphis – that sit happily alongside those made for children. This museum always felt like a miraculous toyshop. It still does, but with added wonder and joy.
