In the early 1950’s, the artist Nigel Henderson took a series of iconic photographs depicting children skipping and playing hopscotch on the streets of Bethnal Green. These powerful images illustrated cohesion, found through play and thriving amidst the poverty of a fractured, bomb damaged East End. They focussed a debate about the values and physical entities that fostered community and engendered culture, which influenced a generation of architects and still seems relevant today.

Images of contemporary East End kids have, for the last year, adorned hoardings surrounding the second phase of redevelopment at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s outpost in Bethnal Green, The National Museum of Childhood. Now the hoardings are down and it is apparent, following the completion of Caruso St John’s £4.7 million transformation of the Museum, that these architects, at least, continue to take such debate seriously - albeit in a manner which might have surprised The Independent Group, of which Henderson, alongside the Smithsons, was a member.

That part of the V&A came to find itself in this historically impoverished area of East London seems both strange and wonderful. The museum building was originally constructed in 1857 on what is now the site of the V&A itself. It was an early manifestation of Albertopolis, the complex of institutions that developed, on Prince Albert’s instigation, to commemorate the success of the Great Exhibition. Indeed, the structure is similar in intent to Paxton’s Crystal Palace, with three partially glazed, barrel vaulted aisles of filigree, cast iron construction, supported on a slender iron frame.

By 1865, the South Kensington Museum had expanded into more dignified permanent buildings and, in a typically Victorian programme of social improvement, the temporary structure was disassembled and re-erected eight miles east in Bethnal Green. The director, Henry Cole’s, intention was that it would be locally managed. In the event, it remained under the control of its parent institution, officially becoming home to the V&A’s childhood collection in 1974.

Entering the vast interior of the original building, its social nature is immediately apparent. Families and children of all classes, races and ages mingle together. Excitement is palpable, helped by an acoustic which gives the feeling of a market or, perhaps, a circus tent. Peter St John has commented on the extraordinary openness of this space and Phase 1 of the redevelopment, completed in 2003, investigated the inherent possibilities of its encompassing scale. To this end, the function of the central bay of the plan was clarified and specially designed furniture employed, in order to reveal the fish-scale pattern of the marble mosaic floor, running the length of the building. Also, the entire space was re-finished in soft, Victorian pink, a historically accurate tone but used in a flat, contemporary manner, emphasising surface and volume rather than detail. In this second phase an interlocking circular pattern, recalling Bridget Riley, has been painted across the mezzanine ceilings, making visual relationships with the structural forms of the building. This treatment, on probably the largest visible surfaces, again emphasises the scale of the whole.

The transformation of the displays, which began then and has now concluded, establishes a successful dialogue with these larger volumes and surfaces. Metal framed glass cabinets refer to elegant, Aston Webb designed originals, some of which still stand, restored, amongst them. Their proximities, form and the crystalline, reflective qualities of their flush surfaces establish intimate and complex spatial conditions, counter-pointing and mediating the sense of scale with that of children.

Colour coded, adjustable, interiors allow the cabinets themselves to recede, emphasising exhibits and establishing thematic dialogues with activity areas that intersperse them. It is here that the play of scales is perhaps best expressed, through real play. So, amongst the fantastic collection of dolls houses on the upper gallery, several of which contain miniatures of themselves, is a child’s sized kitchen where, during my visit, a father sat giant-like on a small chair under the vast roof and was served imaginary tea in tiny cups by his young son.

However, it is beyond the main hall that the extent of this latest phase of work is fully apparent. Much of it has involved the careful restructuring of the basement. Here a new learning centre, encompassing art spaces and a lunchroom, has greatly increased the Museum’s capacity to cater for school and community groups. These are pleasant, well-tempered environments, articulated through a rich, warm, colour palette - but we must move to the front of the building to discover the most dramatic change.

In its first incarnation, the frame of the building was clad in painted, corrugated metal sheet. Following the move to Bethnal Green, the architect JW Wild replaced this with a finely wrought brick skin, adorned with mosaic panels on the long elevations. Concurrently, he designed a new frontage to the building, an entrance loggia linking a series of structures: clock tower; curator's residence; refreshment room and library. Lack of funding left these unbuilt, and left the building with a decidedly blunt façade against which an inadequate lean-to attempted to define the sequence of entry.

This unsatisfactory situation has been resolved. The architects have constructed a new entrance, offering a generous and elegant foyer to the revitalised interior. This incorporates a community gallery as well as access down to the new basement facilities, which include well-appointed, surreptitiously flamboyant toilets. It is worth saying that these spaces do not represent the essay in tectonics, which we might have come to expect from this practice. Parts of the interior are timber lined in Douglas Fir, but this has been over-painted in a mossy green hue. The rather beautiful structural soffit, of close centred steel T-sections, which echoes the concrete structure of the Practice’s Walsall Gallery in its formal articulation, has also been painted out. This subliminates the material change of the panels between the downstands and achieves a delicate overall impression, akin to folded paper. There is more direct material expression in the basement corridor but generally these new spaces seem principally concerned with volume and surface. Their proportions successfully mediate the interior scale with that of the human and, through an enlarged opening, they establish a direct visual relationship between interior and street beyond. 

Such adjustments to our institutions are undoubtedly familiar, responding to the need to increase accessibility for diversified audiences or to facilitate commerce. The drama here is the manner of the intervention, for externally the new building does not subscribe to the manners of contemporary modernity by establishing a deferential, if formally and materially distinct, relationship to the existing. Instead it appears intent on tackling and extending the preoccupations of its Victorian forbear, head on.

Undemonstrative and compact in form, it is through the surface that this engagement is played out. Almost as if it were a compression of Wild’s original intentions, the façade is expressed as a loggia. However, rather than being defined spatially, it is represented entirely pictorially, through the application of geometric, polychromatic stonework, the colours of which respond to those of the existing mosaics. CNC cut, red porphyrys describe the trabeated colonnade, while pale limestones and quartzites are used to infill the gaps. This dialectic between planarity and perceived depth extends through the use of glazing set flush with the stone in three of the bays, whilst the remainder contain panels of a repetitive, geometric motif, offering a further illusion of three-dimensionality, in the manner of a Sol Lewitt drawing.

The impression of tautness intensifies, paradoxically, where the entrance is actually allowed to recess. The temptation to continue the rhythm of the loggia in the form of ‘real’ structure is resisted. Instead the surface ‘stretches’ into the resulting space. Corners fold around in a soft radius and the patterns continue.

However, the question of the appropriateness of such applied decoration remains. The inscribed ‘structure’ cannot be said to represent the actual. The addition is not columnar and any relation to the structural rhythms of the existing is a loose one. There will be some who will simply dismiss this as an unwelcome return to Venturi’s decorated shed – but Venturi argued that surface applications are “independent of the architecture in content and form and have nothing to do with the spatial or structural elements to which they are applied.” This infers a conception of representation that is generalised and unsituated. For me, at least, that seems at odds with the quite specific concerns this project establishes.

Its use of polychromatic, inlaid stones, ‘intarsia’, recalls those that appear in early Christian baptisteries or decorate the facades of Renaissance churches, notably Alberti’s façade for Santa Maria Novella. The technique physically denotes ceremonial or festival structures, in a manner that might respond to the Museum’s current programme but which also offers direct associations with 19th Century architectural theories important at the time of its construction, notably those of Gottfried Semper. In his book Der Stil, Semper described colour as the most subtle and bodiless of covering materials, appearing as pure form and symbolising human events. He believed that the forms and colours of monumental architecture originated in commemorative festivals which reinforced community, and developed from temporary ‘dressings’ such as fabrics, festoons and garlands.

Caruso St John have previously expressed an affinity with Semper. For their Zurich Landesmuseum competition entry, undertaken around the time of this project’s inception, Adam Caruso suggested that they had made a “pure Semper façade”. When one compares the drawings of it with the completed Museum of Childhood, the similarities are evident. However, Semper spent a large part of his career in Zurich, as head of what is now the ETH School, and exerts a strong influence there, so the context is clear. Why might his ideas be important in relation to this project?

In fact, such ideas would also, almost certainly, have had a direct influence on JW Wild - for Semper lived in London from 1850-54 and was associated with the Great Exhibition. Additionally, his Dresden Opera House strongly influenced the Royal Albert Hall, on which Wild worked as an assistant and this, in turn, influenced the design of the Museum. In any case, Wild would have heard similar theories even closer to home. Owen Jones, author of ‘The Grammar of Ornament’ was his brother-in-law.

In a 1998 Essay, ‘The Tyranny of the New’, Adam Caruso stated that “the imperative to make forms that have no connection to the past and are the harbinger of an advanced future is anti-critical and conservative…a more radical formal strategy is one that considers and represents the existing and the known.”  This is not post-modern rhetoric. Rather, it represents a deep concern that modernity should contend with continuity. Radical or not, in this context it seems at least appropriate that Caruso St John should seek to ‘complete’ the Museum in a manner which both critiques and responds to ideas from the time of its making.

Perhaps, however, this project is ultimately successful in its resistance to received notions of what a building for children ought to look like. Instead, the careful interior adjustments, alongside the memorable fabric of its new façade, have brought a sense of renewed purpose and dignity to a much loved institution. One can only look forward to the intended third phase, when the building’s already significant urban contribution will be further realised. The existing offices from the south side of the basement are intended to be relocated, to make way for a café and an exterior public space. In engaging the neighbouring, currently rather introverted, gardens and the church beyond, these will continue the stitching together of the Museum’s rich but fragmented context. If undertaken, they will culminate a project that has already succeeded in placing the festivities of play at the heart of the civic and cultural life of the community…where they undoubtedly belong.