Victoria & Albert Museum: Ground Movements Due to Pile Installation and Basement Excavation for the Exhibition Road Quarter

As part of the ongoing ‘FuturePlan’ estates redevelopment at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington, the Trustees of the V&A commissioned a new world class gallery in the Boiler House Courtyard adjacent to Exhibition Road. The gallery is constructed entirely below ground level to create a new public courtyard and feature entrance, with virtually no superstructure to hold the basement down. The winning design by architects AL_A required the installation of approximately 235 linear meters of permanent hard-firm secant pile wall within 1m of the Grade 1 listed façades of the V&A structures. The excavation of the 17m deep basement comprised a hybrid top-down/bottom-up sequence that incorporated an upper level of temporary circular steel props and a lower level “double doughnut” slab that later formed the permanent exhibition floor space. The paper presents the building movements that occurred during pile installation and compares them to the case histories presented in CIRIA report C760. Observed building movements due to the basement excavation are also compared to predictions from non-linear three-dimensional finite element analyses and comparable case history data. The paper also discusses how the observational method (ipso tempore D, C760) was used to address undue settlements caused by wall installation in one section of the listed façade structure, and how this approach avoided significant programme delays occurring. A discussion is provided on how this was possible as the designers provided a one stop structural and geotechnical design service to the client with no other design interfaces.