Warehouse as a Wunderkammer

Apart from the large logo of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) at the top of the facade, there is little to indicate arrival at the V&A East Storehouse and the extraordinary experience awaiting the visitor inside. The entry is through modest flush steel doors in an existing warehouse façade, appropriate one might think for a storage facility. The entrance lobby is equally utilitarian and unadorned, with a seating area and café to one side. Entry to the Storehouse itself is through a glazed airlock, from which the staircase ascent to the first floor and the crossing of a suspended walkway reveals the dramatic three storey Weston Collections Hall at the heart of the building. The extraordinary twenty metre high, top lit space, appears with its contents in one sweeping vista. It is like finding oneself in a massive film studio set full of props and room scenes or being released into the largest sweetshop ever.

Neither monumental nor distinctive

The Storehouse occupies an 80 x 80 metre part of a 275 metre long behemoth of a shed which was built as the Media Centre for the 2012 London Olympics. Unlike the V&A Museum in South Kensington, its building’s exterior is neither monumental nor distinctive. It is the wide expansive interior space and the presentation of its contents which are striking. It gives visitors a spectacular place to wander amongst the panoply of displayed artefacts whilst observing everyone around them as a collective experience. In what is a massive warehouse of the V&A’s reserve, stuff is visible in every direction: here a painting, chest of drawers, bust of a head, or a ceramic plate, there a musical instrument, Moulton bicycle, or a washbasin. In the sense that everything here is in storage, it is all presented as back of house. Towards the building’s periphery, frameless glazed partitions invite visitors to observe work in the conservation studios below. Public gantries overlook the study rooms where visitors who under the new ‘Order an Object’ scheme can request upto five objects from the reserves, examine their items, or walk in the David Bowie Collection archive

The project was generated by the government’s decision to sell Blythe House, the old Post Office Savings Bank in west London where since 1979, the V&A had stored much of its reserve collections, which were only accessible to staff and researchers. This generated a rethink of how to treat the ever increasing collection of stored items, consisting of 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 Archives. The New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) won the project competition in 2018, with a design promoting the idea of a publicly accessible museum reserve. The Storehouse intentionally rearranges the relationship of the visitor to the contents, by disrupting the conventional museum’s spatial order in which display and conservation are segregated, the former placed on show whilst the latter is hidden. Visitors are able to wander freely looking at the endless stored items largely not behind glass. It has achieved this with a curatorial technique of setting 100 displays into the ends and along the sides of the shelf stacks, ‘hacking’ them into the racks, as DS+R and the V&A describe it. There are a few curated displays in glazed vitrines presenting east London narratives or current topics such as acquisition and gender. Passing the racks adjacent to the stairs, full of furniture and a variety of smaller curious artefacts, calls to mind an image of Alice in Wonderland grabbing things off shelves as she falls down the rabbit hole. The design is the product of DS+R’s enthusiasm for gallery collections. It is also a reminder of Diller and Scofidio’s earlier observations on the uneasy interdependence of museums and visitors. Their 1989 installation ‘para-site’ in MOMA New York, suspended disorienting mirrors and dissected chairs in some of its galleries, and turned strategically mounted surveillance cameras on its visitors, transmitting fragmented images of them.

Museum hall as agora

The Storehouse is a hybrid typology, as Elizabeth Diller states ‘neither a store nor a museum’, with a distinctive architecture of the interior, not of the street. It is a repository with a spectacular Wunderkammer the size of a grand exchange building inside it. The main intervention was to cut through the existing warehouse floors to form the Hall as an autonomous volume bringing the public to engage with the contents in a theatrical agora with an artificial sky of even light suspended below the exposed structure and services. Its purposeful architecture is juxtaposed with the workings of the warehouse. The Hall’s unobtrusive detailing affords clear views across the endless IKEA like storage, and into the open displays of artefacts, conveying a sense of uninterrupted access. The elegant steel edge beams and minimally joined frameless glass balustrading around the atrium walkways, reduce visual disturbance from the building fabric. In other elements, the building’s storage function is expressed in straightforward details. The steel dogleg staircase to the upper floors slotted between the shelf racks, is robustly made, its handrail supports apparently extruded from the flush steel balustrades. In critical locations, diagonal structural steels are almost playfully wrapped with red and white tape where visitors could inadvertently walk into them.

Entire building fragments are installed around the hall. In artful curation, Edgar Kauffman’s 1930s timber lined office by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen are encased in timber packing frames reminding us they are in storage potentially ready for transportation. Alongside two other building elements, the fifteenth century elaborately decorated Torrijos ceiling from Spain is displayed in a white space on the first floor. Part of the Collections Hall floor is glazed, revealing the Storehouse’s lowest floor and a length of the 17th-century marble Agra Colonnade, the reserve’s heaviest item, standing amongst the lines of shelving where staff can be seen moving objects. Of all the elements, the most poignantly ironic is the facade section saved from the demolition of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens housing. Detached from the building, it hangs over part of two walkways around the hall, replacing part of the glass balustrade.

No exterior, only interior

The Storehouse itself is without an exterior building form or elevations. As part of its hybrid typology and occupation of an existing building, an exceptional characteristic is its hidden architecture and absence of form making. Unlike some other UK cultural conversions, The Tate Modern’s occupation of Bankside power station the most famous, the host building is unmemorable. European galleries and museums have recently rethought how their stored collections are housed. Some have new buildings developed as stores with exhibitions inside iconic architectural forms, with the potential to draw crowds of visitors. As one of the first, the Laurenz Foundation in Basel constructed its Schaulager, by Herzog de Meuron (2003), an inscrutable monolithic shed decorated with earth clad façades. Described as a ‘show warehouse’, it is designed as a store with separated public display. Of the new art store genre, the most eye catching is MVRDV’s freestanding Depot (2021), containing the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s art store in Rotterdam. Its mirrored ovoid form holds a central public circulation space of crossing stairs, containing exhibition displays some in glazed boxes, surrounded by closed stores and conservation rooms with viewing windows. In both, the new architecture is offered as the spectacle. Public access to their stores is largely limited to viewing windows, without the V&A Storehouse’s opportunities to browse. In DS+R’s interpretation the extraordinary artefacts of the V&A’s reserve collections and their presentation make the spectacle, without a need for a new iconic building attraction. – Rosamund Diamond