Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum stands in the South Kensington district of London, founded in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures and renamed in 1899, when Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of a grand new main facade, in honor of herself and her late husband Prince Albert, both of whom had championed the museum's founding mission of improving design education through access to fine craftsmanship. The building's principal Cromwell Road facade, designed by the architect Aston Webb, was completed in 1909 in an ornate Renaissance-influenced style intended to signal the institution's civic importance, and it is crowned by a tower and dome flanked by sculpture representing the arts and sciences. Internally the museum grew through successive additions over more than a century, resulting in a sprawling and architecturally varied complex that includes the cast courts, purpose built to display full-scale plaster casts of major European sculpture and architecture for study purposes. The museum is widely regarded as the world's leading museum of applied and decorative arts and design, and its building has itself been treated as an evolving showcase of British architectural taste since the Victorian era.