Young V&A’s Making Egypt exhibition: Materials as storytellers

At the V&A, we design exhibitions that respond closely to the curatorial narratives. This means each design is bespoke to the content and narrative it showcases. The challenge we have set ourselves is to find ways of doing this with a minimal environmental cost.

In recent years, society’s drive to find sustainable ways of living has increased and, in parallel, designers’ emphases on considering the lifecycle of materials has come to the fore. During the Modernist movement, form followed function. Given the challenges we are now facing, it can be argued that form ought to follow sustainable material practices. This shift in paradigm means we face a challenging, yet exciting, moment in the design of temporary exhibitions.

Making Egypt arrived at the Design Studio as Young V&A’s second temporary exhibition, with an ambition written in the brief to:

“Put the past in dialogue with the present by revealing the enduring legacy that the creativity of Ancient Egypt has had, and continues to have, on our popular culture and collective imagination.”

We framed our design strategy by asking the following questions: 

1. What is the existing material context of the temporary gallery space?

2. How can we materially connect to Ancient Egypt?

3. Can we design an exhibition with a focus on the sourcing of its materials?

We decided that the material approach for the design would be to maximise the reuse of any existing display furniture, and that the virgin materials would be, where possible, designed for reuse and, where not, for disassembly. Finally, we would use colour and light to make the space feel vibrant and distinctive. 

Using URGE Collective’s carbon calculator, among the materials commonly used in temporary exhibition design, we identified acrylic as the most environmentally costly, contributing 31% of the build’s total embodied carbon.

Despite its practical usefulness as a conservation-safe transparent material, the production of acrylic is energy-intensive, and the material itself does not biodegrade. Therefore, we took as a key priority to reuse as many existing acrylic cases as possible. We mapped out the existing cases in the gallery space and allocated the objects according to visitor circulation. In those instances where we didn’t already have suitable cases, we built new ones using recycled acrylic. As a result, we achieved the first V&A exhibition design with zero virgin acrylic. By reusing and recycling acrylic, we were able to prevent ca. 2,644 kg/CO2 of emissions.

In parallel, as part of our reuse strategy, we identified setworks used in other temporary V&A exhibitions and creatively thought about ways of reusing them in Making Egypt so that they would be seamlessly integrated into the new design. Among other things, we reused a curved wall from the previous show, Myths to Manga, to create a panorama of the fertile land of the Nile.

But what about material use in Ancient Egypt itself? Since Ancient Egypt was a pre-industrial civilisation, reflecting its use of materials would in itself be a means of achieving a more sustainable design. Materials could then become storytellers.

We researched the sourcing and use of materials in Ancient Egypt and found out that mud and linen were some of the most commonly used materials. (By contrast, timber was scarce and its use was limited to specific functions.) Nile mud was used extensively for pottery, and also to make rectangular, sun-baked bricks. Wood was a valuable material, often imported, that was used in boat- and furniture-making. In our own setworks, we decided to use a ratio of mud to timber that reflected how these materials would have been used in Ancient Egypt. 

The next step was to plan how to source these materials within the UK, and to explore how we could embed contemporary craft in the design of the exhibition. For the timber, we reached out to Bedfordshire-based Guy Lambourne, who has previously provided us with coppiced wood for a display at South Kensington. Guy’s coppiced willow and hazel was then treated by the Preventative Conservation team to ensure it was safe to use in the museum environment. 

We used the willow to frame the entrance to the exhibition and to evoke the shores of the Nile as the visitors enter its first section, which is titled, ‘Imagining’.

We used the coppiced hazel to make the display furniture for the second section, ‘Communicating’. In this room, we reused all the cases and inserted coppiced canopies to create a sense of being in a busy market in Ancient Egypt. We used historic references to detail these structures, you can find more about how we translated Ancient Egyptian references in the design of Making Egypt in this blog.

In the final section of the exhibition, ‘Making’, we predominantly used clay in a structural way. Bricks made out of clay-rich earth and chopped straw were carefully laid out by the team at Sam Forster Associates – the main contractor responsible for building the exhibition – to display the objects in this room, in a layout inspired by an archaeological drawing of a kiln from the Amarna site in Egypt.

The clay bricks we used, also known as ‘strocks’, are not fired, just like the Egyptian sun-baked bricks, which means they have a low carbon impact on the environment, and that they can be taken apart at the end of the exhibition, watered down, and then used to make new bricks.

We also used clay in a more ornamental way, inspired by patterns found in Ancient Egyptian tombs. Specialist clay craftsman, Madoka Ellis from 121 Collective, prototyped and crafted clay panels to frame the AV content in this section. The AV showcases contemporary makers demonstrating techniques used in Ancient Egypt. Madoka also made a rammed earth block to display objects inside a case; the rammed earth was too crumbly to be used in the open display!

But now, what are the facts? We gathered data from the main contractor Sam Forster Associates, and analysed it, again using URGE Collective’s carbon calculator. If we look at the sourcing of the materials used in the exhibition, these are the figures: 26% are reused, 11% are recycled, 29% of virgin materials are reusable, 5% are recyclable. 29% will go to waste.

Our next goal: can we bring waste to 0%?