Daniel Libeskind's Spiral Museum

A Blow, Perhaps Fatal, for Libeskind's Spiral in London
By ALAN RIDING




ONDON, July 27 ˜ Eight years after the Victoria and Albert Museum chose Daniel Libeskind's radical design for a modern extension, the building still exists only on paper. Now, for the third time, the museum has been refused public money for the project, and it looks increasingly unlikely that the Spiral, as the extension is called, will ever be built.

In theory its striking tumbling-boxes look is not the issue. But from the moment the Spiral was chosen over seven competing designs in 1996, it has stirred passionate debate here, dividing traditionalists from those eager to see London embrace avant-garde architecture. And inevitably this controversy has shadowed the museum's arduous search for financing. The project's estimated cost started out at $72 million (in today's dollars) and rose to $160 million this spring before Mr. Libeskind found ways to reduce it to $110 million to improve its financing prospects.

The museum's choice of Mr. Libeskind's design was certainly daring. At the time this Polish-born American architect was largely unknown. Three years later he won international acclaim for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Since then his master plan for ground zero has made him a household name in New York. But his new fame may not suffice to save the Spiral.

So far private donors have pledged $55 million, and the museum was gambling that a grant of public money would encourage more private contributions. But last week the Heritage Lottery Fund turned down its request for $27 million. And with no other government or private money in view, the Spiral's fate may well be sealed when the museum's trustees meet here on Sept. 16.

Mark Jones, the museum's director, has fought long and hard for the Libeskind extension, but he conceded that the lottery fund's decision "seriously jeopardizes the future of the Spiral." And he added: "London badly needs great contemporary architecture. I believe the Spiral would be a symbol of London's pre-eminence in design. Let's hope a private donor can be found."

Mr. Libeskind was more sanguine. "Of course it was a disappointment," he said in a telephone interview from Denver, where he is building an extension to the Denver Art Museum. "Cultural projects have always been difficult if they have some boldness to them. But being the optimist that I am, I think this will be built ultimately. Of course, it needs government funding."

But this seems improbable, and some London newspapers have already begun to write obituaries for a project that would have been, if realized, the city's first major work of contemporary architecture associated with a cultural institution.

Some people will celebrate the demise of what they considered a shocking addition to the Victorian facades on the Exhibition Road side of the museum. William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times of London, wrote somewhat hyperbolically in 1996 that its construction would be "a disaster for the Victoria and Albert Museum in particular and for civilization in general." And opposition to the Spiral remains virulent.

Others, including some leading British architecture critics, applauded the museum's audacity. English Heritage, a government watchdog body, said the Spiral "is a superb design of outstanding innovation and could herald a watershed in public taste." No less crucially, in November 1998, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea gave the Spiral its planning permission. What was missing was money.

By the late 1990's, a plan to use profits from a new national lottery toward "good causes" was helping to renovate the Royal Opera House, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery and to transform an abandoned power plant into the Tate Modern. But the Victoria and Albert was slow to apply for lottery money. When it finally did so in 2000, the Millennium Commission turned it down on the ground that the Spiral was "insufficiently distinctive."

Still, from the day he succeeded Alan Borg as director in May 2001, Mr. Jones has embraced the Spiral as a symbol of the museum's commitment to both contemporary design and the decorative arts. "The V.&A. was founded to show the best of contemporary design to inspire Britain's creative industries," Mr. Jones said in an interview. "The Spiral would give us a new exciting space to do this in a building which is itself outstanding and an inspiration."

Meanwhile, he set about modernizing the museum, not only by dropping entrance charges and organizing crowd-pulling shows like "Art Deco 1910-1939" and "Vivienne Westwood" but also with structural changes. New British Galleries, costing $55 million, including $31.7 million in lottery funds, were inaugurated late in 2001. A new Islamic Gallery, paid for with a $9.7 million private donation, will open in 2006. And new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries are planned for 2009 at a cost of $45 million.

But the Spiral was stalled, even though it had the support of the government. The government does not control the bodies that since 1995 have given $10 billion in lottery money to some 160,000 cultural projects of all sizes. And over the winter it became apparent that only a lottery grant could get the Spiral off the ground. When the Arts Council of England refused a request for $9 million in February, the museum looked to the Heritage Lottery Fund as its best hope for rescuing the project.

After cost estimates grew to $160 million, Mr. Libeskind found a way of reducing its price tag, to encourage a positive response from the fund.

"I'm not interested in building an eight-year-old building in London," he said. "The building has evolved, it hasn't remained static. I dropped the heavy tiles. It will now have ceramic. It has been value engineered in a very contemporary way. It has become more flexible as the V.&A. programs have evolved. But it is no less bold and exciting. It has the same mission: how do you open this museum to a new public?"

Had the Heritage Lottery Fund approved the Spiral grant, the museum would have needed just $28 million more to complete the project. Instead the fund, which has distributed $5.8 billion in the last decade, gave $27 million to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and $19.8 million to restore a canal in the Cotswolds. Carole Souter, the fund's director, said the board decided that while "both imaginative and technically impressive," the Spiral would not deliver major heritage benefits.

Mr. Jones was perplexed. "The V.&A. is one of the greatest guardians of the nation's heritage," he said, noting that the Spiral would extend the museum's historic mission into the future.

"It's not that I need another museum project," Mr. Libeskind said. "I've got four museums in North America. I've got new museums in Milan, Prague and Dresden. But I believe in this process. I believe it is so important for this institution and for the spirit of London, which is, after all, a great city. Who knows, maybe in the 21st century a building like this could be done with private funding. I don't think it should, but who knows?"

The expectation in museum circles, however, is that if no major new private contribution turns up in the next few weeks, the museum trustees will abandon the Spiral in September.

"You know, it's funny," Mr. Libeskind said, "a lot of people in America say, `When I went to London I looked for the Spiral.' Well, it hasn't been built yet. The irony is that it has been around, people refer to it and relate to it. The only thing that is missing is the building."