In the heart of East Bank in Stratford, O'Donnell + Tuomey has completed the new V&A East Museum, which opens to the public on 18 April 2026 as part of the wider cultural development of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Sister site to V&A East Storehouse, which opened in May 2025, the new building completes one of the UK’s most significant museum projects of the decade.
Co-created with young people, creatives and east London communities, the museum is conceived as a free, open and accessible civic space bringing together art, design, fashion, music and performance in a new institution rooted in the city’s contemporary cultural landscape.
A museum conceived as public space
Located on Waterfront Square, V&A East Museum is envisioned as a place where people can meet, find ideas and encounter making in all its forms. The brief asked for a museum that would be welcoming, distinctive and genuinely open to all, especially young people, east London communities and visitors who may not usually feel at ease in museum spaces. O’Donnell + Tuomey’s response is a building that does more than house collections: it operates as an extension of the public realm, drawing people in and establishing continuity between city and museum.
John Tuomey described the project as an example of “public work with civic purpose”, a principle central to the practice. That civic ambition is reinforced by the museum’s position within East Bank, alongside London College of Fashion, UAL, Sadler’s Wells East, UCL East and the future BBC Music Studios.
A folded façade shaped by Balenciaga and the idea of ‘Ma’
The architectural concept emerged from the sculptural tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga in the V&A collection, particularly his attention to the space between body and garment.
Left: Drawing Study X-Ray Building. Right: X-Ray Ballenciaga Dress - Photograph by Nick Veasey 2016
This reference is paired with the Japanese concept of “Ma”, or “the space in between”. Together, these ideas informed the image of a protective outer shell wrapping a more rational internal core. Between structure and façade, a sequence of circulation routes rises upward through the building, turning movement into a key part of the architectural experience.
The folded façade is the museum’s defining element. It is made of 479 sand-coloured precast concrete panels, each uniquely shaped and scored with profiles referencing the V&A logo.
Aligned across the three-dimensional envelope, the linework creates a continuous pattern that catches changing daylight throughout the day, animating the exterior without relying on overt spectacle. Integrated benches at ground and podium level extend the threshold of the building into the public realm, inviting direct contact between body and architecture.
Five public levels and circulation carved into the wall thickness
Inside, the museum unfolds across five public floors spanning around 6,500 square metres. The programme includes two permanent galleries, a temporary exhibition gallery of nearly 900 square metres with six-metre-high ceilings, a top-floor project and events space, learning facilities and a café. These spaces are vertically aligned and connected by a continuous route carved from the thickness of the external walls, transforming circulation into an architectural promenade.
Terrazzo concrete floors reinforce a sense of material continuity with the public spaces outside, while carefully positioned windows and three public terraces introduce daylight, framed views and visual connections to East Bank and the city beyond. Two entrances, at waterfront and podium levels, provide a barrier-free welcome through triangular openings that recall pattern-cutting darts. The white interiors remain calm and precise, providing a clear backdrop for exhibitions, commissions, live events and temporary programmes.
A museum made with and for east London
What defines the project as much as its architecture is its participatory approach. V&A East Museum has been co-created with young people, artists, creatives and local residents, and that collaborative ethos informs both the building and its programme. The permanent Why We Make galleries, designed by JA_Projects with A Practice for Everyday Life, Larry Achiampong and the V&A East Youth Collective, bring together more than 500 objects from the V&A collection across art, architecture, design, performance and fashion, addressing themes such as identity, wellbeing, social justice and environmental action.
The museum also opens with the major inaugural exhibition The Music is Black: A British Story, the largest exhibition ever staged on the impact of Black British music on British and global culture, featuring over 200 objects. Alongside it, the New Work programme presents newly commissioned works by artists including Tania Bruguera, Rene Matić, Carrie Mae Weems, Laura Wilson and Justinien Tribillon, while Thomas J Price’s 18-foot sculpture A Place Beyond welcomes visitors at the waterfront entrance.
An architecture designed to endure in the city
V&A East Museum completes the V&A East project and strengthens East Bank as a new cultural hub in London, rooted in the legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games. Yet the importance of O’Donnell + Tuomey’s building lies not only in its urban role. It also rethinks the museum as an open, everyday structure capable of protecting objects without isolating itself from city life.
With its folded façade, circulation routes carved into thickness, and threshold constantly extended into public space, the museum refuses to present itself as a sealed object. Instead, it is an architecture to move through, inhabit and share. In Stratford, V&A East Museum does not simply open a new building; it gives form to the idea of a museum that wants, first of all, to be part of the city.
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Photos ©Hufton + Crow, Courtesy of V&A
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