The Sackler Education Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum
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Sackler Centre, reception
Dennis Gilbert Download Original
Education facility featuring a 140-seat multi-purpose auditorium, study rooms and a digital studio
The Sackler Centre for arts education in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is built around a reception dominated by a concrete staircase and the cedar-clad underside of a new auditorium.
The architects reworked two floors of the museum’s Henry Cole Wing to provide workshops, studios, a gallery and dining hall, as well as the auditorium.
In the reception, mirrored surfaces highlight and reflect Victorian details and inflate the sense of space. New elements are forged from concrete, glass, steel and timber. Reopened archways channel natural light into the deep-set plan, and inside the auditorium, a curving, timber wall-roof encloses the rows of steeply raked seats.
The centre of the plan is occupied by a workshop and digital studio on the lower floor and a seminar room above. On the western flank is a dining hall, while toilets and a corridor on the eastern flank lead to a reopened arch, the reception and the staircase.
Data
- Begun: Feb 2007
- Completed: Jul 2008
- Floor area: 1,650m2
- Sectors: Education, Arts and culture
- Total cost: £2.6M
- Procurement: GC/Works/1 without quantities
- Address: Victoria and Albert Museum , Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL, United Kingdom
Professional Team 
- Architect: Softroom
- Project architect: Christopher Bagot
- Client: Victoria and Albert Museum
- Structural engineer: Arup
- Quantity surveyor: Turner and Townsend
- Project manager: Lend Lease
- Project manager: V&A Property Services Department
- Main contractor: Allenbuild
- Acoustic consultant: Sound Space Design
- Auditorium consultant: AMPC
- Fire consultant: Arup Fire
- Access consultant: Earnscliffe Davies
- Concrete consultant: David Bennett Associates