LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Victoria and Albert museum will undergo its biggest redevelopment in 50 years with a $217 million revamp. The layout of the museum will be redesigned and new areas will be built to make it more modern and visitor friendly. Mark Jones, the museum’s director, stated, ’The museum is an extraordinary historic building but it is complicated and the layout often confuses people.’ In the plans are new Mediaeval and Renaissance galleries, funded in part by an anonymous donation. Half of the budget will go to the Spiral building that will hold V&A’s contemporary collections. Mark Jones added, ’The museum is an extraordinary historic building but it is complicated and the layout often confuses people. The focus of the plan is to bring clarity to the V&A by ensuring that the collections are easy to understand and magnificently displayed.’

The Spiral Extension to the Victoria & Albert Museum shares in the spirit of the twin inscription carved on Cromwell Tower Entrance, Inspiration and Knowledge, and carries that message into concrete space and its content. The building goes beyond the habitual division between programme and history, form and function, architecture and engineering, by offering new possibilities within the horizon of an evolving cultural and educational resource. The bulding is a decentred Spiral, celebrating public activities in a unique historical setting. The building represents a new awareness of the central role of contemporary museology, technology, arts and crafts, in sustaining tradition and education in a spectacular cultural setting, central not only to London, but to Europe as a whole. (Daniel Libeskind)