V&A East Storehouse

Across the great museums of the earth, there is on average a meagre 3% of the total collection on display to the public at any one time. The remaining 97% hides away in backrooms and warehouses, often for decades at a time. This conundrum of the (not so) public institutions, as Liz Diller explains, is what the V&A East Storehouse set out to resolve.

Diller and her team at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the New York-based architecture firm behind the new space, took this brief as an opportunity to flip almost every convention of the traditional museum space. Usually, the most public point of a museum is the front door, and as one progresses further into the building it becomes gradually more and more hidden away. The Storehouse, contrarily, puts accessibility quite literally at the centre. Emerging from an inconspicuous tunnel, the visitor’s entrance to the exhibition space begins in the spellbinding main atrium. From this point, one sees seemingly endless rows of objects. These objects, however, are not concealed by the display frames of a museum nor the vaults of a storage unit, instead they breathe the same air as the visitors. Arranged in three concentric rings connected by tributaries, there is no indicated exhibition route, just an invitation to explore.

The curation adheres to the same eclectic and vast spirit of the architecture. A 15th century ornate Moorish ceiling display sits alongside a t-shirt from Hackney Pride 1993; a child’s West Ham shirt nestles between oil paintings of ancient Mesopotamia. This random distribution owes to the intended interchangeability of the displays; a key innovation of the V&A East initiative is their new click-and-collect-style Order an Object service. Any of the aforementioned objects that might take your fancy, or anything else in the collection for that matter, can simply be added to an online basket. An appointment will be arranged so that researchers of any pedigree can get up and close with their chosen artefacts within two weeks, an unprecedentedly speedy turnaround.

Perhaps the best opportunity that has arisen thanks to the sheer scale of the storehouse is the opportunity to exhibit things that were simply too big to put anywhere before. The Kaufmann Office, an interior by seminal American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has been fully reconstructed in all its cypress plywood glory. The only one of its kind this side of the Atlantic, the interior has been sat in storage like a forgotten IKEA flatpack for much of the time the V&A has owned it. Similar reconstructions of a Frankfurt Kitchen and the facade of the once-local Robin Hood Gardens estate offer further examples of landmark 20th century architecture through the avenue of social housing. 

Ultimately, no exhaustive list will ever cover the range of fascinations on display in this collection, and it will only keep growing. The new space truly lives up to the institution’s award-winning tagline: If you’re into it, it’s in the V&A.