For British architect Amanda Levete, the Victoria and Albert Museum is ‘South Kensington’s drawing room’, an institution stuffed full of the finest antiquities and treasures in the land. Over the past 15 years, it has evolved to become the world's leading museum of art, design and performance, and Levete has been instrumental in its transformation.
In June, the new Exhibition Road Quarter, designed by her practice, opened to great fanfare. The whole of South Kensington, (dubbed by local cultural folk as Albertopolis, Queen Victoria's proposed name for the area), joined in a week-long celebration in order to inaugurate what is the biggest addition to the V&A in 100 years.
Consisting of 1,100 metres of space, the Sainsbury Gallery is dedicated to the sort of blockbusters the V&A has become expert at hosting, and its inaugural exhibition 'Opera: Passion, Power and Politics', is hoped to match previous hits such as Alexander McQueen s Savage Beauty and the retrospective of David Bowie.
The gallery is accessed through a screen designed in 1909 by the museum’s original architect Sir Aston Webb to hide the boilers, newly remodelled to become a colonnade, and in the new Sackler Courtyard, made entirely of porcelain tiles in homage to the museum s rich tradition of ceramics.
Levete's combination of old and new perfectly reflects the DNA of the V&A and is, by her own admission, a wish-list project. Levete dreamt of working on a major public and cultural project since she started as an architect, and it 'doesn’t get much better than this', she says. 'This isn't just about a gallery; it’s an opportunity to create a new public space for London'.
Her success at creating seductive public spaces has been proven recently in Lisbon too, where the curvaceous Museum of art, architecture and Technology (MAAT) opened earlier this year. Levete has knitted together a former power station and a sculptural new building containing the Oval Gallery, which hosts site specific installations a la Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
Located on the banks of the River Tagus, on the pulsing waterfront at Belem, MAAT features more outdoor than indoor space and is as much about connecting people to this part of the city as it is about boosting home grown talent in a country that is accustomed to seeing its artists leave. 'Lisbon is one of my favourite cities after London', says Levete. 'It's high octane, relaxed, tolerant and affordable, the climate is sublime and it has the best seafood in the world.'
She will miss her jaunts there, now MAAT is open, and Paris has replaced Lisbon as her commuter city. Work has begun on the transformation of the Galeries Lafayette flagship on Boulevard Haussmann.
With its famous cupola, the 120-year-old institution will become 'a department store for the 21st century,' says Levete, who vows to build on tradition and celebrate the exquisite craftsmanship of the building and its location in the heart of Haussmann's Paris. 'We're re-imagining the department store as a piece of city.'
The rebooted Galeries Lafayette will introduce the grandes dames who shop in its famed aisles to new labels, modern architecture and online shopping.
Levete has fulfilled a similar brief with another visionary scheme before in 2003, when she was one half of Future Systems, she and her then husband, the late Jan Kaplicky, created a futuristic silver-fronted store for Selfridges in Birmingham.
Kaplicky died in 2009 after he and Levete had separated, and she set up AL_A architects in the same year. Fifty staff work from her north London office on projects all over the world including Central Embassy, a 1.5 million sq ft complex consisting of a Park Hyatt hotel and luxury retail mall, opened this summer in the former gardens of the British Embassy in Bangkok. Its facade, clad in aluminium tiles, is a mix of digital design technology and craftsmanship and builds on the country's tradition of constructing intricate patterns.
Levete is the latest on a roster of high profile architects, among them Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid, to design a care centre for cancer charity Maggie's in Southampton. Maggie's was founded by the late Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of cancer in 1995 and she and her husband, architectural writer Charles Jencks, believed in the positive effect of well-designed buildings. The Southampton centre will be the charity's 20th, adding to an impressive architectural portfolio.
There are only a handful of female British architects at Levete's level and despite the odds she manages to play as well as work along with her husband Ben Evans, co-founder of the London Design Festival. Levete is a fixture on the social scene. The couple's home, not far from the studio in north London, has a long lacquered dining table which seats 20 (and is regularly occupied), alongside other furniture that she has designed.
Levete remodelled the Victorian space in 2010, injecting avant-garde details, among them a white slit of a fireplace that references one of her favourite artists, Lucio Fontana. An invitation to dinner chez this design power couple is an extremely hot ticket.