Amanda Levete won the competition for the extension of the V&A Museum

London - British architect and former wife of Jan Kaplický, Amanda Levete, has won the competition to complete part of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The famous arts and crafts museum selected her design from a hundred proposals.
    The museum aims to modify the entrance to the collections from Exhibition Road, under which new spaces for temporary exhibitions will be created underground. This will increase the exhibition space for the permanent collections.
    The project comes seven years after the museum abandoned the design by Daniel Libeskind, titled Spiral, which generated considerable controversy and ultimately proved too expensive. The realization of Amanda Levete's design is expected to cost £35 million (980 million crowns), and the museum claims it has already received half of the necessary amount from an unnamed patron.
    Levete collaborated with Jan Kaplický for 20 years at the studio Future Systems, which realized notable buildings including the Selfridges department store in Birmingham and the press box at Lord's cricket ground. After Kaplický's death two years ago, Levete established her own studio, ALA.
    "The Victoria and Albert is an incredibly prestigious museum and has a special significance for me because it is home to art and architecture. It can't get any better," commented the fifty-five-year-old Levete on her competition victory.
    According to the London Evening Standard, winning this contract is a turning point for her. "She won the most prestigious architectural competition this year in Britain and highlighted her independent studio after being in the shadow of her late former partner Jan Kaplický for so long," the newspaper wrote.
    The museum's management hopes the project will be completed by 2015. It is part of a ten-year plan for the museum's reconstruction and modernization. Within this plan, new exhibition galleries for fashion and furniture are expected to open next year.
    Architect Eva Jiřičná, of Czech origin, also significantly contributed to the renovation of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 2003 and 2008. Her architectural studio designed the jewelry gallery, two galleries for sculpture and plastic art, as well as the main gift shop, the main entrance from Cromwell Road, and the underground entrance from the tunnel that leads from the subway to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the opposite Natural History Museum.