1. V&A: Out of the
attic
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the world’s largest
museum of art and design. As it approached its 150th birthday,
RENEWED the museum had become dusty and introverted – acting more as
the nation’s attic than its original role, an inspiration to contemporary
designers. The V&A’s new director, Mark Jones, set out to change all
that. He launched a hugely ambitious programme called FuturePlan
to revitalize the V&A’s buildings and redisplay its collections. Alongside
this renewal Wolff Olins was asked to update the V&A’s brand.
V&A presents We reinvigorated the V&A’s sense of purpose, moving it from a
museum to an art and design brand that operates on a world stage.
fragmented organization. And we designed a new visual identity
in which the familiar V&A logo, designed by Alan Fletcher in 1989,
appears large but in the background, suggesting the V&A’s role
as presenter, inspirer and impresario. Following this design work,
the V&A launched a programme to update its ways of working,
called CulturePlan.
20 million The refreshed brand, launched in autumn 2002, immediately helped
visitors shape the V&A’s programming, including successful shows on
Versace, Vivienne Westwood and black British style. Visitor numbers
went up, membership doubled, and the V&A started to attract
completely new sponsors, like the furnishing store Habitat, keen
to be associated with the V&A’s new spirit of creativity. By 2009,
2.5 million people were visiting the V&A in person, 34% more than
in 2002. Much more dramatically, website visitors from across the
Wolff Olins world had risen from 1.6 million to 20 million: the V&A had become
a global art and design brand.
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