The Architecture Gallery at the V&A This is the first museum gallery in the country dedicated to architecture in the UK. It provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the art, use and practice of architecture. On display are models, drawings and designs, and samples of materials, as well as photographs and fragments of buildings. Interpretation includes audio commentaries, interactive style guides, videos and touch objects. The Architecture gallery is organised around five themes: The Art of Architecture The Function of Buildings Structures Architects and Architecture, from conception to detailed instructions for builders Buildings in Context, with the changing urban fabric of Trafalgar Sq as a case study.

In 2004, the V&A alongside Royal Institute of British Architects opened the first permanent gallery in the UK[78] covering the history of architecture with displays using models, photographs, elements from buildings and original drawings. With the opening of the new gallery, the RIBA Drawings and Archives Collection has been transferred to the museum, joining the already extensive collection held by the V&A. With over 600,000 drawings, over 750,000 papers and paraphernalia, and over 700,000 photographs from around the world, together they form the world's most comprehensive architectural resource.

Not only are all the major British architects of the last four hundred years represented, but many European (especially Italian) and American architects' drawings are held in the collection. The RIBA's holdings of over 330 drawings by Andrea Palladio are the largest in the world,[79] other Europeans well represented are Jacques Gentilhatre[80] and Antonio Visentini.[81] British architects whose drawings, and in some cases models of their buildings, in the collection, include: Inigo Jones,[82] Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Kent, James Gibbs, Robert Adam,[83] Sir William Chambers,[84] James Wyatt, Henry Holland, John Nash, Sir John Soane,[85] Sir Charles Barry, Charles Robert Cockerell, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,[86] Sir George Gilbert Scott, John Loughborough Pearson, George Edmund Street, Richard Norman Shaw, Alfred Waterhouse, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Charles Holden, Frank Hoar, Lord Richard Rogers, Lord Norman Foster, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid .

As well as period rooms, the collection includes parts of buildings, for example the two top stories of the facade of Sir Paul Pindar's house[87][88] dated c1600 from Bishopsgate with elaborately carved wood work and leaded windows, a rare survivor of the Great Fire of London, there is a brick portal from a London house of the English Restoration period and a fireplace from the gallery of Northumberland house. European examples include a dormer window dated 1523–35 from the chateau of Montal. There are several examples from Italian Renaissance buildings including, portals, fireplaces, balconies and a stone buffet that used to have a built in fountain. The main architecture gallery has a series of pillars from various buildings and different periods, for example a column from the Alhambra. Examples covering Asia are in those galleries concerned with those countries, as well as models and photographs in the main architecture gallery.