Plans are afoot to move the V&A’s Members’ Room and Carmody Groarke, an award-winning architecture studio based in London, have been selected to design the new £1.3 million flexible and atmospheric space. The competition attracted interest from architects across the world before 5 teams were shortlisted and the winner was announced. The new Members’ Room […]

Transformers are alien robots hailing from the planet Cybertron, a metallic world riven by aeons of civil war between Heroic Autobots and Evil Decepticons. The differences between these two factions are absolute: Autobots are peace-loving, kind and curious about humanity; Decepticons are bellicose, authoritarian and contemptuous of other lifeforms. Transformers came to Earth by accident: […]

‘Better it is to get wisdom than gold’ Motto above the original entrance to the V&A As the V&A has recently launched its research institute VARI, and is obliged to make its publicly funded project outcomes (currently journal articles, excluding monographs at present – see AHRC Open Access ) available to all under open access, […]

As an Archives Assistant in the Archive of Art and Design, one task that I am charged with is the box listing and cataloguing of archives. This can be a very interesting process and sometimes leads to the cataloguer making new and exciting discoveries. This is particularly true of personal papers within our collections. One […]

In my previous blog we saw how chairs are used as signs of power and status. In this blog I will look at other types of seat on which to place on your (more lowly) medieval bottom Medieval houses were generally sparsely furnished so it is not surprising that very few examples of medieval furniture […]

Fans of Games of Thrones know how impressive an important seat of power can be. This is also true in medieval manuscripts where images of thrones feature often when depicting earthly and heavenly rulers. You don’t, however, always need a fancy throne like the Iron Throne of Westeros to show your importance; any chair with […]

The V&A’s National Art Library has its own WIFI hotspot exclusively for members of the library. From your own device, you can now access the museum’s range of electronic resources including the VOGUE ARCHIVE, JSTOR, Oxford ART Online, ARTSTOR and the Art Sales Index.

From its founding in 1852, the South Kensington Museum (as the V&A was first known) took a leading role in the reproduction of art works to serve as models for artists and designers. As part of this mandate, casts, photography and electrotypes were acquired and commissioned. They were regarded as an essential part of the […]

Iris Moon is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute, New York.  She discovered Joubert while doing research on the Lyon silk industry for a new project on luxury during the French Revolution. She was happy to have the chance to discuss his book with specialists in textiles at the Courtauld […]

In 1921, the V&A acquired Oscar Jennings’ collection of around 24,000 initial letters from early printed books. The collection, which was offered to the museum by Jennings’ widow Cecile, had formed the basis of his 1908 book Early Woodcut Initials. Thanks to our fantastic team of volunteers, we have recently begun to digitise these and make them accessible via the V&A’s Search […]