A futuristic museum for XTEND Design

Overview

XTEND Design is a London practice working between architecture, digital fabrication and exhibition design. The brief was a museum: a building whose form, surfaces and circulation would read as a continuous piece rather than a set of rooms, and whose interior would hold changing exhibitions without being rebuilt for each one.

Our part of the work was conceptual development. We worked through the massing, the sequence a visitor moves along, and the character of the surfaces that define it, taking the idea far enough to be drawn, discussed and published.

The approach

The starting point was movement rather than plan. A museum is experienced as a sequence: an approach, a threshold, a series of volumes that open and compress, and a release at the end. We developed the concept around that sequence first, and let the structure follow it.

The second move was to treat the surface as the architecture. Rather than walls carrying applied finishes, the envelope, the light and the exhibition structure were developed as one continuous system, with the geometry shaped so that light grazes it and gives each part of the route its own quality.

The third was flexibility. Exhibition programs change faster than buildings. The concept had to allow a gallery to be reconfigured without touching the shell, which shaped where the structure, services and circulation were placed.

Surfaces and light

The interior was developed as a set of curved, perforated surfaces lit from within and behind, so that the boundary between wall, ceiling and display reads as one body. Light is used as the main material: it defines the threshold, marks the turns along the route, and makes the geometry legible without signage.

The studies tested how far the surface could be opened before it stopped reading as a solid, how dense the perforation needed to be for the light to feel continuous, and what that implied for fabrication.

Publication

Alongside the design work we worked on a publication documenting the concept: the studies, the drawings and the thinking behind the approach, prepared so the project could be presented and discussed outside the studio.

Writing the project up forced the concept to be explicit. Decisions that had been made by eye had to be stated as positions, which sharpened the design as much as it recorded it.