The most interesting new building in London this year is one that borrows its logic from fashion. The V&A East Museum, designed by Dublin- and London-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, opened on April 18 in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — and it is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of civic architecture. What makes it genuinely distinctive, however, is the conceptual framework from which it emerged: the sculptural tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Japanese spatial concept of Ma. Most museums begin with a brief about square footage, circulation, and climate control. This one, by the architects’ own account, began with the question of how a Spanish couturier shaped the air around a body, and what a building might learn from that.

The Building

From the outside, the V&A East reads as a series of folded planes in sand-coloured precast concrete — 479 panels, each shaped and scored with profiles that reference the V&A’s logo. The effect is of a building that has been draped rather than stacked, its surfaces catching light differently throughout the day in a way that feels more textile than tectonic. Look at it in the morning, when the eastern sun rakes across the panels, and the facade reads almost as a piece of fabric pinned to a frame. By the time the light flattens at noon, the same surface looks heavier, more sculptural, more obviously a wall. The building has the slightly disconcerting quality of changing what kind of object it appears to be at different hours.

O’Donnell + Tuomey have spoken about the influence of Balenciaga’s approach to the space between body and garment — the way his designs created volume not through padding or structure but through the precise engineering of negative space. The cocoon coats, the envelope dresses, the sack-line silhouettes that defined the house in the 1950s and 1960s: all of them worked by holding the cloth a calculated distance from the wearer, treating the gap as the design rather than the cloth itself. A Balenciaga jacket is, in the most literal sense, a study in what is missing. The building operates on a similar principle. Its five storeys are organised around voids, double-height spaces, and unexpected sightlines that give the interior a quality of spaciousness that exceeds its footprint. Visitors are routed past openings rather than through corridors. The plan is, in places, more interested in the intervals than in the rooms.

Ma — the Japanese concept of meaningful emptiness, of the interval between things — provides the philosophical counterpoint. Where Balenciaga offers a method for shaping space, Ma offers a reason: that the spaces between objects are as important as the objects themselves. Ma is not a metaphor borrowed for marketing. It is a working principle in Japanese architecture, music, and calligraphy, where the silences and the gaps are not absences but presences with their own weight. For a museum that will house over 500 objects in its permanent collection, the principle is more than resonant; it is structurally necessary. Encyclopaedic museums fail when they treat empty space as wasted space. The V&A East has, from the brief stage, treated the gaps between things as part of what is on display.

The two ideas — Balenciaga’s tailored void and the Japanese interval — share a deeper assumption: that what is not there does the work of definition. A jacket is its drape, not its fabric. A temple courtyard is its emptiness, not its walls. A museum, by extension, is the rhythm of pauses between objects, not the objects in series. To draw from both traditions in the same building is not eclectic; it is to triangulate a single proposition from two cultures that arrived at it independently. That triangulation is the building’s intellectual move, and once the visitor sees it, the precast facade begins to look less like a stylistic choice and more like a diagram.

The Programme

The V&A East is not a satellite — it is a new institution with its own identity, designed to connect art, design, fashion, music, and performance in ways that the South Kensington mothership, constrained by Victorian architecture and departmental tradition, cannot easily accommodate. The original V&A is a brilliant and difficult building. It was conceived in the nineteenth century as a museum of manufactures, expanded in fits over more than a hundred years, and organised by department in ways that have been at war with cross-disciplinary curating for decades. Anyone who has tried to mount a serious fashion exhibition there knows the difficulty of moving ceramic galleries, of negotiating temporary partitions through staircases that were not designed for them, of borrowing wall space from neighbouring departments. The new building has been conceived without these inheritances. It does not need to apologise for its corridors.

Two free permanent galleries anchor the programme. Why We Make presents over 500 objects from the V&A collection, ranging from architecture and visual arts to fashion and performance. The curatorial approach is thematic rather than chronological — objects are grouped by impulse rather than era, allowing a medieval textile to sit alongside a contemporary sneaker without either one losing its dignity. This is a quietly radical hanging logic for the V&A, an institution whose nineteenth-century DNA is taxonomic. To group by impulse rather than period is to argue that the history of making is not a relay race between movements but a series of recurring questions answered, in different materials, across centuries. It is also an argument that a sneaker and an altarpiece can keep each other company without one being condescended to.

The inaugural temporary exhibition, The Music Is Black: A British Story, explores how Black British music has shaped national culture from 1900 to the present. It is a statement of intent — a signal that the V&A East will engage with culture as a living, contested, multi-voiced practice rather than a settled canon. Programming a temporary opener about a century of Black British music, in Stratford, on a site shaped by the 2012 Olympics and the demographic realities of east London, is not a neutral choice. It says, before any wall text, that the museum understands where it is.

The Neighbourhood

Context matters. The V&A East sits in a cultural cluster that includes the London College of Fashion, Sadler’s Wells East, and the BBC’s new studios. The proximity to the London College of Fashion is particularly significant — it creates the possibility of a feedback loop between design education and museum practice that few institutions anywhere in the world can match. Students working on collections a five-minute walk from a building shaped by Balenciaga’s tailoring is not a coincidence; it is, presumably, a brief. The V&A’s collection of historical garments, partially housed in the new V&A East Storehouse nearby, becomes a teaching resource at a scale and proximity that no fashion school in the world has previously had. Whether the school takes that opportunity is a separate question. The architectural conditions for it now exist.

The Olympic Park location also represents a bet on London’s eastern trajectory — a recognition that the city’s cultural centre of gravity is shifting. The V&A East is both a response to that shift and an accelerant of it. Olympic legacies are mostly disappointing; the buildings outlive the moment that justified them and become, in time, expensive embarrassments. Stratford is a partial exception. The infrastructure has held; the housing has filled in around it; the cultural buildings now arriving — V&A East among them — give the site a second life that does not depend on athletic nostalgia. By the time the museum opens its second decade, the Olympics will be a footnote. The buildings will be the point.

The Architecture Question

There is a broader conversation to be had about museums and fashion. The Met Gala notwithstanding, the relationship between fashion institutions and architectural ones has historically been arm’s-length. Fashion exhibitions happen in art museums; fashion schools exist in separate buildings; fashion criticism and architectural criticism rarely share a page. The disciplines speak different vocabularies, defend different territories, train in different schools. When fashion does enter architecture, it usually enters as content — a retrospective, a costume gallery — rather than as method. The V&A East proposes the inverse: fashion as the source of the building’s logic, with the content following.

The V&A East, by drawing its architectural logic from fashion itself, suggests a more integrated model. If a building can be shaped by the principles of couture, then the traditional hierarchies that place architecture above fashion — as the serious art, the permanent art, the structural art — begin to dissolve. This is a hierarchy that has been quietly under pressure for some time. The same year that Stratford gets a museum tailored to Balenciaga’s geometry, Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries open at LACMA with their own argument about how a museum should be organised. The two buildings could not be more different in character — Zumthor’s elevated concrete arc in Los Angeles, O’Donnell + Tuomey’s draped concrete folds in London — but they share an underlying question: what should a contemporary encyclopaedic museum feel like, and what spatial language should produce that feeling?

In Los Angeles, Zumthor’s answer is a single open plane, 220,000 square feet of unbroken floor, with art arranged thematically across continents and millennia. In London, the answer is a stack of voided floors organised around a fashion-derived geometry. Both reject the nineteenth-century enfilade — the stately march of room after room — in favour of more associative, more porous arrangements. Both, in their different ways, treat the spaces between objects as part of the curatorial argument. That two of the most important museum openings of 2026 share this underlying instinct, while looking nothing like each other, is worth noticing.

The same week, on the other side of the channel, Junya Ishigami’s pavilion at the Vitra Campus opens with the most extreme version of the same idea: a building whose entire architectural argument is the precision of its absences. The columns are too thin to read as structural; the walls dissolve into glass; the roof is barely there. Read alongside Ishigami’s pavilion, the V&A East is the heavyweight version of the same instinct — couture geometry rather than forest engineering, but the same conviction that the gap is the work.

O’Donnell + Tuomey have not made a fashion museum. They have made a museum that thinks the way fashion thinks — in folds, in negative space, in the tension between surface and structure. It is a subtle distinction, but an important one. A fashion museum would house the V&A’s couture archive in dedicated galleries; this building does that and more. It treats fashion’s intelligence — its method of shaping space — as architectural source material. The garment becomes the diagram, not the object on display.

The Verdict

The V&A East is the most significant new museum building in London since the Tate Modern extension, and it arrives at a moment when the conversation about what museums are for — and who they are for — is more urgent than ever. The building alone is worth the trip to Stratford. What happens inside it over the coming years will determine whether the V&A East becomes merely a beautiful container or something more transformative.

There is a precedent worth invoking. The Tate Modern conversion, two decades ago, made a case that an industrial building could become the most important art venue in the country if the architecture was honest about what it was inheriting. The V&A East does not inherit a power station; it inherits a discipline. Its architectural language comes from a Spanish couturier who designed clothes that asserted the dignity of negative space, and from a Japanese aesthetic tradition that treats the interval as a presence. That this language has been translated, in Stratford, into 479 precast panels and a sequence of voided floors is unusual. Whether it is repeatable is another question. Most fashion-into-architecture moves so far have been interior — a shopfit, a residence, a restaurant. The V&A East takes the move structural.

For now, the container is exceptional. The next decade will tell whether the institution that fills it can match the building’s intelligence. The signs, in the choice of opening exhibitions and in the relationship the museum is already cultivating with the London College of Fashion next door, are encouraging. A building that thinks in folds and intervals deserves a programme that does the same.

V&A East Museum is open to the public. Admission to the permanent galleries is free.