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Due to open in 2017, Amanda Levete Architects’ project for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London transforms a previously inaccessible back-of-house space into a new 1500 sq m courtyard, entrance and subterranean gallery. It’s the museum’s largest architectural intervention of the past 100 years. Here, lead architect on the project, Alice Dietsch, talks through the scheme with Cate St Hill.

The project creates a new entrance to the V&A on Exhibition Road. Can you explain how you are addressing that threshold?
The building has been driven by its position next to Exhibition Road, and in particular the brief of a courtyard from the V&A is very much a result of the changes on Exhibition Road since it became a semi-pedestrianised street. The whole project is about giving a new entrance to the V&A, not only a new door, but a new way to experience the museum and maybe attract different audiences. In a way, we are bringing Exhibition Road into the museum and the museum on to Exhibition Road.

Project lead architect Alice Dietsch

How will you achieve the folded plate ceiling that spans some 30m in the underground exhibition space?
The ceiling or folded roof is very much a structural solution to span the 38m of the gallery column free, so it's a very efficient way to provide a large exhibition space. It's also a continuation of the ornate ceiling of the V&A and the tradition of neo-classical and neo-gothic ceilings that can be seen in the museum. But at the same time, it's a very technical piece of architecture as well: the folds are designed to hide all the technical equipment such as lighting tracks, projectors, hanger points and things like that, so we made a design out of the constraints of the gallery brief.

A new porcelain tile is being developed for the courtyard floor

How will you bring light into the new basement gallery?
There are three skylights in the scheme. The whole brief from the V&A was for a gallery underground, so the challenge of the design was to bring daylight into the spaces deep below the courtyard, and also to provide views so that you can orientate yourself as you go down; in that way it doesn't really feel like a basement. There's a skylight that gives views of the building as you go down the staircase to access the gallery; there's a second one we call an oculus that brings daylight into the gallery and gives views from the courtyard into the gallery, and vice versa. And there's another one that is a sort of framed opening in the roof that gives views of the sgraffito wall -- one of the existing facades in the courtyard.

A folded ceiling will span the 38m-wide basement gallery without columns

Are you taking inspiration from the museum itself or its collections?
For sure, it is one of the only projects in the office that we are doing where we can comfortably play with patterns, motifs and ornaments, which we maybe couldn't do so easily in other contexts. But in the context of the V&A, we really wanted to continue the tradition of arts and crafts, and ornament and detail. One of the main ways we are doing that is on the courtyard floor. I believe it will be the first porcelain courtyard in the world; we are developing a unique tile that is made of porcelain with a blue inlay of glazing. That will form an overall pattern that reflects the folded gallery ceiling below.