V&A 150th anniversary

What better way to celebrate a milestone birthday than to gather your friends together and have them each say what they like most about you? Of course when it’s 150 you’re turning and you’re an institution as vast and diverse of content as London’s V&A, it makes far more sense to put pen to paper instead and this is exactly what they’ve done.

In celebration of their 150th anniversary, the V&A have asked more than 150 leading designers, architects, photographers, fashion designers and artists to create a page, in whatever form they wish, revealing how and why the V&A inspires them. The pages will be displayed at the V&A on 26th June before being bound into a one-off album.

And we’re thrilled to have been given exclusive access to them first. We’ve chosen our favourites and spoken to their creators who each told us a little more about their chosen inspiration and designs below (click on the images to enlarge them). And our celebration doesn’t end there- click back here tomorrow to see all 150 pages in our exclusive online gallery.

Sodano Aboud

Inheriting an iconic logo to work with is a daunting task in itself. We’ve always wondered what the missing characters in Alan Fletcher's V&A logotype would look like. So we collaborated with Julian Morey, a typographer who was at St. Martins School of Art with ourselves. He painstakingly sought out the basic characters of Fletcher's original design, and from them created the V&A font as you see now. When we presented it to our client, their feeling was 'akin to a discovery of an old friend'.

The V&A is a constant source of inspiration and escape when one feel's the pressure of clients and the world. Turn your phone off and escape into its corridors for hours.

Julian Opie

This is Ludovine, my sister in law. I offered to draw her and her partner Luc as a wedding present last year. I have only recently learnt to draw people from the side and it allows me to do some new things. I had a project in mind to draw a couple from all four sides, then make a painting or film where the heads rotate randomly. I thought this was a way to draw two heads and a relationship at the same time.

Both Luc and Ludovine have a slightly 19th Century look and this fits well with the oval format that I'm using at the moment. Heads are an oval shape so it makes logical sense to put them in an oval frame yet it looks very old fashioned and brings a particular genre of portraiture to mind. While making this work I looked at the V and A's web site to see the oval sillouette portraits that they own. This was part of the impetus to make a series of works in laser cut paper in replica oval frames with domed glass and brass hanging hooks.

Jay Osgerby and Edward Barber

The V&A is a constant source of inspiration to us. The collection imprints itself in one’s mind. We wanted to illustrate the cerebral nature of its archive hence the drawing is made up of many layers. Ink outlines of pieces from the collection overlap and intertwine to create an intense composition.

1 of 3  |  Previous, Next

25 June 2007 | Art