Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art, 1857–1909

Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art, 1857–1909 is Julius Bryant’s richly illustrated study of the Victoria and Albert Museum as a designed object in its own right. Published by Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing, the book examines how architecture, engineering, painting and ornament shaped the South Kensington building during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Rather than treating the museum merely as a container for decorative art, Bryant considers its rooms, façades and circulation spaces as part of the collection’s meaning. Drawings, watercolours and historical photographs reveal how the building became an ambitious public demonstration of art applied to manufacture.

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Designing the V&A as a Work of Architecture

The V&A’s South Kensington building began in 1857, when the institution was known as the South Kensington Museum. Bryant’s central argument is that the museum itself deserves the same attentive study as the objects displayed within it. Its architecture records changing ideas about education, industrial progress, national culture and public taste.

This approach makes the book both an architectural history and an institutional history. Decorative programmes were not separate additions applied after construction. They formed part of a coordinated environment in which structure, surface, display and movement worked together.

Henry Cole and Art Applied to Manufacture

Henry Cole, the museum’s founding director, wanted the building to demonstrate the value of good design. The museum’s collections were intended to educate manufacturers, designers and the public, while its architecture provided a visible example of those ambitions. The project connected the reforming ideals associated with the Great Exhibition of 1851 to a permanent cultural institution.

Cole commissioned prominent artists and designers to contribute to the interiors. Frederic Leighton, G. F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones were involved in painted decorative schemes, while Owen Jones and Morris & Company contributed expertise in colour, pattern and ornament. Engineers also employed innovative materials and construction methods, making the museum a meeting point between artistic authorship and industrial production.

Victorian Decoration and Museum Identity

The book shows how ornament established the museum’s identity. Ceramic decoration, mosaics, murals, ironwork, coloured surfaces and patterned floors transformed functional spaces into an encyclopaedic display of artistic and technical possibility. The museum building instructed visitors before they encountered an individual gallery object.

These interiors also reveal debates about what a museum should be. Rich decoration could embody cultural confidence and provide examples for designers, yet later generations increasingly favoured neutral settings in which objects appeared visually independent from their surroundings. Bryant notes that reactions against Victorian decoration began during the Edwardian period, earlier than a simple narrative of Modernist rejection might suggest.

Aston Webb and the V&A Completed in 1909

One of the book’s most important episodes concerns Aston Webb’s competition-winning design for completing the museum. Webb won the competition in 1891, but delays and changing priorities affected the realised building. The monumental Cromwell Road entrance and adjacent marble halls opened in 1909, giving the institution the public façade closely associated with it today.

Bryant compares Webb’s competition proposal with the final structure and considers the influence of alternative competition designs. This analysis demonstrates that major civic buildings rarely emerge from a single, fixed vision. They develop through negotiation among architects, administrators, government funding, engineering constraints and changing expectations.

Drawings, Watercolours and Historical Photographs

The publication’s visual evidence is especially valuable. Architectural drawings explain proposed structures, while watercolours preserve decorative schemes that were altered, covered or removed. Historical photographs record the relationship between objects, cases, galleries and visitors at particular moments.

Much of this material had received limited attention within conventional accounts of Victorian art and design. By bringing it together, Bryant allows readers to compare intention with execution and to see how the museum changed over time. The images make the volume useful for architectural historians, conservators, interior designers and researchers studying museum display.

The 2017 Designing the V&A Display

The book accompanied the V&A display Designing the V&A, held at South Kensington from May 2017 to January 2018. The display used original drawings and photographs to trace the building from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the Exhibition Road Quarter. Book and display formed complementary ways of presenting research produced from the museum’s architectural and design archives.

Why the Book Matters to Design History

Designing the V&A demonstrates that institutions communicate through buildings as well as collections. Entrances establish civic identity, routes organise knowledge, interiors frame interpretation and materials express attitudes towards craft and industry. These principles remain relevant to contemporary museum and exhibition design.

The study also connects several important subjects: the legacy of the Great Exhibition, British design reform, Victorian architecture, museum education and the changing status of ornament. Readers can extend these themes through Encyclopedia Design’s articles on the Victoria and Albert Museum, Owen Jones and Aestheticism.

Who Should Read Designing the V&A?

The book is particularly suitable for architectural historians, museum professionals, conservation specialists, interior designers and readers interested in Victorian decorative art. Its combination of scholarly interpretation and visual documentation also makes it useful for teaching, reference libraries and anyone planning a close architectural visit to the V&A.

Book Details

• Author: Julius Bryant
• Publisher: Lund Humphries in association with V&A Publishing
• Publication year: 2017
• Series: V&A 19th-Century Series
• Format: Hardback
• Length: 176 pages
• ISBN-10: 1848222335
• ISBN-13: 9781848222335

Sources

• Bryant, J. (2017). Designing the V&A: The museum as a work of art, 1857–1909. Lund Humphries.
• Bryant, J. (2017, May 4). “Designing the V&A”: Some reflections by the author. Lund Humphries.
• Victoria and Albert Museum. (n.d.). Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857–1909).
• Victoria and Albert Museum. (n.d.). Designing the V&A.
• Victoria and Albert Museum. (2024). A history of the V&A on Exhibition Road.

Related Articles

• Victoria and Albert Museum: A Leader in Decorative Arts
• Owen Jones: British Architect and Ornamental Designer
• International Exhibitions of the Victorian Period
• The Great Exhibition in Art: Picturing the First World’s Fair
• Discover Aestheticism: The Art Movement of the 19th Century