V&A East Storehouse: a mesmerising experience where the collection becomes the building

As you probably know by now, V&A East Storehouse is a triumph – a gallery-warehouse hybrid that transforms public access to museum collections. Given the public hadn’t yet been granted access when those headlines were written, perhaps a little caution is required. And if you’re looking for a museological revolution with Pompidou pizzazz, you’ll definitely be disappointed. 

As a repurposed portion of the 2012 Olympics Media Centre in east London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this is essentially a branded unit, on a 100-year lease, in a smart business park. When you pass through the flush metal entrance, the lobby resembles a co-working space or affluent academy school: exposed services; floor-to-ceiling glass; laminated wood scattered round and about; poured concrete floors; the requisite café; and ‘creative spaces’ (aka classrooms). Though, interestingly, no shop.

It’s pleasant enough, and that’s fair enough – a loose-fit, in-between space where visitors can decompress before hitting the main show.

Which is when things get interesting. Leaving the lobby via a single compact metal staircase, you negotiate two sets of doors with airlock vibes, the stairs continue through confining storage racks, then you finally emerge into the 20m-high void at the core of the Collections Hall.

Mesmerising visual overload

Having ‘burrowed in’, as Liz Diller of architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro puts it, you need a moment to adjust. Under a ceiling of LED panels, four levels of storage fill every corner of your vision (there is even a glass floor), crammed with a gallimaufry of ‘precurated’ objects: armoires, reliefs, costumes, swords, marquetry, machinery, mannequins, a bust of Lord Carrington, a chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, a Moulton bicycle, all cheek by jowl, some still under wraps, most with minimal information. 

The architecture is deliberately anonymous, and the effect is mesmerising – the vastness, variety and slight craziness of the V&A’s collection, and of its remit, become the building. It’s a bit Turbine Hall, a bit Safestore, a bit Cast Court, a bit Raiders of the Lost Ark, a bit cabinet of curiosities (the last is the official one).

Here, objects are clustered as much by the taxonomies of storage – size, type, weight, fragility, sensitivity to light – as those of curatorship. Similarly, display stands are minimal, with technical teams ‘hybridising’ the straps and pallets of warehousing for the display environment. Some items have panels or QR codes to help you out. Most just have an old linear barcode on a tag.

For those of us hidebound by the old ways, this requires recalibration. There is a frisson of trespassing, going off limits, as you pace the balconies and head into the racks, autonomous and (if you’re like me) completist, set free in an enormous junk store. In V&A East Storehouse, there are no rules – until you run up against one of its demure security gates. But these can be moved around, allowing the visitors’ domain to be the subject of constant experimentation.

And that frisson is deliberate, derived from Diller’s own thrill at going behind the scenes at the V&A’s previous warehouse (the converted Victorian headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in West Kensington) enjoying the self-sufficiency and secrecy of its logic and language. 

Opening up the institution

The stepped entrance up to the Collections Hall's first floor isn’t great accessibility messaging, but has justification beyond the spectacle. Throughout, Hawkins\Brown’s original two-storey structure has proved admirably adaptable. A large hole was punched in its single supported slab to open up the main void; this level for new arrivals was added; and additional walkways and balconies hung off existing structural columns.

Below, the ground floor (super-sturdy, given the building’s past) is now reserved for the realities of a working warehouse-cum-museum, thus off-limits to visitors. A couple of forklifts trundle about its well-appointed space, which is almost always in view, whether via sideways glimpses or deliberate vistas. Colourful ceramics are visible through that square of glass flooring, while viewpoints look over work in progress, including one with a live feed of delicate conservation work in a multipurpose studio.

That last example of exposure feels like it asks a lot of staff, thus may require tweaking to survive a prolonged encounter with real life. Similarly, when I revisited, the child-focused suggestions board had angry cards criticising the occlusion of the East End’s Anglo-Jewry in displays.

But perhaps such vulnerability is a necessary part of opening up the institution of the museum; of removing practical and psychological barriers between its users; and of flipping the norms of access, storage, conservation and display. Symbolically, the most public space is now at the centre of the building, ringed by semi-public archives, with private study and deep storage areas at the edge. You really do feel enmeshed within the institution’s activities.

Despite the overall architectural and curatorial reticence – both parties preferring to ‘lean into the delirium of the collection’, as Diller puts it – exhibitory decisions are still required. The experience of visiting V&A East Storehouse may be less filtered, more autonomous, but the outward-facing ends of its racks offer multiple opportunities for objects to be plucked from obscurity and plonked on a plinth, almost at random, to surprise and delight on a rotating basis. ‘You can twist the kaleidoscope however you like,’ in another of Diller’s apt phrases.

There are also more traditional displays in occasional vitrines, which largely eschew the ‘story of an object’ approach for explorations of what it means to collect, install, conserve and interpret. That museological introversion offers insights, but risks becoming repetitive, as ‘baring all’ tips over into ‘droning on’. At some point, the lens will need to turn out again, re-engaging with the objects themselves.

In this respect, the success of those displays prioritising local themes, from music hall to protest, is encouraging. Many have been produced in collaboration with community groups as part of an aim for ‘relevance’ to the population east of Tower Bridge, who might not see themselves reflected in the existing institutional experience. Long-term, though, the eternal curatorial challenge remains – to communicate that all the objects stored here are rich in humanity, that all are relevant.

Finally, six ‘large objects’ have been embedded across V&A East Storehouse: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann Office; one of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchens; the 15th-century Torrijos Ceiling (embellishing a gallery space on one level, but with its patched-up wooden structure laid bare on the next); Picasso’s massive front cloth for Le Train Bleu (in an acoustically controlled auditorium); the 17th-century Agra Colonnade (the heaviest item in the V&A’s collections, installed at ground level but visible through the glass floor); and the aforementioned chunk of Robin Hood Gardens, completing its long journey from desperately needed social housing to middle-class fable.

When it comes to understandings of design, it all feels rather last century, but, again, impressive local projects inject fresh perspectives and life. Perhaps the opening of the David Bowie Centre in September, designed by IDK, may offer the opportunity for a plot twist.

Blurring the lines

After the headlines fade, it will be interesting to follow visitor numbers, demographics, security, and how people engage with the building and with the collection. Presumably, there will be regular press releases on ‘Order an Object’, which lets visitors select up to five items for close encounters in the extensive Study Centre – a Berlin-era Lou Reed poster is being enjoyed as I look down from the allotted vantage point.

It’s a great idea, fraying the increasingly obsolescent line between enthusiast and scholar, and is emblematic of V&A East Storehouse’s new approach to display, to access, to the purposes and responsibilities of a museum. This is a model for a responsive institution, one always being experimented with, adapting to the needs of visitors, scholars, staff and schools, but also those of the objects and collection, offering an almost constant feedback loop. 

Like most things in life, a museum is a series of balances – between conservation and display, quantity and quality, accession and deaccession (the racks have space for only five years of new acquisitions), didacticism and autonomy, or any combination of the above. Here, those balances can be played with, radically at times. If things don’t work, they can be changed, the institution can change, then it can change again, and again, possibly for 100 years or more. Even if proof of concept has barely begun, V&A East Storehouse really is a model for the future. 

In numbers

GIFA 16,000m2
Mini curated displays 100
Objects 250,000
Books 350,000
Archives 1,000