Holmes Wood gets V&A gallery call

Graphics for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s forthcoming £10m Architecture Gallery will be created by The Holmes Wood Consultancy, in collaboration with the exhibition’s designer Gareth Hoskins Architects (DW 7 March 2002).

The exhibition space, which opens in November, is being billed as the UK’s first permanent architecture gallery, boasting180 drawings, models, photographs and architectural fragments drawn from the V&A and the Royal Institute of British Architects collections. Highlights will include a capital from the Pantheon, drawings by Le Corbusier and a computer ‘fly-through’ of Zaha Hadid’s imminent Phaeno Science Centre in Germany.

The Holmes Wood Consultancy project manager Kirsty Morrison says exhibition graphics are based on the ‘grid-like title blocks’ of architectural drawings, which adhere to the golden section rules of proportion. ‘The gallery is quite bold, and [adjoining] sections are quite different, architecturally. We decided to keep the graphics low key and let the architecture speak for itself,’ she says.

The consultancy is designing title signage, object labels and large-scale, interpretational panels to set the ‘mood and tone’ for the gallery’s displays. It is also responsible for creating a design template and initial graphics for the space’s temporary gallery.

The Architecture Gallery, which is designed to serve as an introduction to the discipline, opens alongside a study room designed by Wright & Wright Architects. It will contain more than one million 2D items representing major British architects.

‘Architecture-related material has traditionally been spread around the museum, and this is the first time we will have a gallery devoted to it,’ says Architecture Gallery curator Gareth Williams.

Craik Jones is creating two touch-screens based on The Holmes Wood Consultancy’s graphics for the gallery. Other communications materials are being designed in-house at the V&A.