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"Zoomorphic" at London's Victoria and Albert Museum: so what if buildings look like animals?

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The increasingly perky Victoria and Albert Museum may not yet have started building its Daniel Libeskind extension, earmarked for all kinds of zeitgeisty exhibitions. And we shall have to wait a while longer for its new architecture gallery, a joint venture with the RIBA that is now, after years of negotiation, finally taking shape. But luckily the museum already has its big "contemporary space" complete with a contemporary-minded team to run it. And here you will find a foretaste of the architecture shows to come.

It is called "Zoomorphic". The museum bought the idea on the appealingly oddball proposition that it is "architecture meets stuffed animals". Actually, it's a simpler concept even than that. A lot of buildings these days draw their inspiration from nature. They look a bit like birds, whales, sea-sponges, armadillos, honeycombs, human vertebrae, amusingly-shaped vegetables, prawns, jellyfish, whatever. Thanks to modern technology, it is now possible to design and build buildings like this without anyone suggesting you should go away and have a little lie-down. That's what the show is about.

Some stuffed animals are there, however, carted over from the Natural History Museum across the road to act as mute commentary on all the models and drawings in the show - which in a further twist are exhibited in deliberately old-fashioned glass-sided display cases, exhumed from some museological basement. Thus presented, the buildings cannot help but take on some of the characteristics of the creatures so avidly collected by 19th century explorers. OK, so it's a slightly arch design concept, driven by a rock-bottom budget, but it just about works. As so often in such cases, the book is better than the show.

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