When Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opened in Rotterdam in 2021, its 35-metre art-filled atrium, designed by MVRDV architects, revolutionised and democratised how museums utilise the vast majority of their collections normally relegated to closed storage. Stepping into the steel-grid expanse of London’s new V&A Storehouse, whose development overlapped that of Boijmans Van Beuningen’s, it’s impossible not to recognise similarities: the naked structural beams, interior walkways, glass-fronted restoration rooms, the aperture in the roof. Though Brendan Cormier, chief curator of the neighbouring V&A East museum, is quick to dispel any comparisons. ‘The Depot is a spectacle of objects through architecture,’ he says. ‘Here it’s much more architecture in the service of objects.’

The objects of which he speaks are too many to sum up: 250,000, to be exact, along with 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. They are in constant rotation around the triple-height atrium and the aisles that radiate off it, through a glass floor and in restoration centres on the periphery. From its grand opening this weekend, the facility welcomes anyone, any day of the week, hoping to plumb the history of design through artefacts that go back a millennium.

‘Inside out’ architecture

A team at Diller Scofidio + Renfro adapted the former Broadcast Centre, built for London’s 2012 Olympic Games, for the purpose. The new 16,000-square-metre temperature-controlled configuration lands somewhere between a museum and a warehouse. Elizabeth Diller calls it an ‘inside out’ building. ‘The typical institution becomes more restricted the further away you get from the front door,’ she says. ‘This is the opposite.’ From street level, visitors climb immediately into the sunlit core — called the Weston Collections Hall — where they can gaze out at chandeliers, building fragments, motorcycles and biscuit tins Cormier’s colleagues have placed at the forefront. Stacks of artefacts lead out from the atrium into additional concentric wings: a semi-private ring of viewing libraries, where the public can request up-close access to any item; and more opaque offices and deep, dark storage on the perimeter. The experience, says Diller, is ‘like the extraction of mineral from a mine, burrowing through a tunnel into the epicentre of this immersive, vast cabinet of curiosities… a densely-packed collection of artefacts arranged cheek to jowl.’

The objective, she says, was to create a sublime feeling of the vastness of the collection — only 2-4% of the V&A’s collection is on display at any given time — and a sense of illicit trespass into a space normally unavailable to public view.

Storytelling through objects

Forward-facing artefacts are always changing and hence the storytelling of the archive. This ‘visible storage’, as Cormier calls it, is dependent on what visitors have requested to see. And this is easy to do, through the V&A’s Order an Object web page, or at the Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and
Conservation of Textiles and Fashion, a place to request up to five of the 100,000-strong textile archive. Bold wayfinding throughout the three open levels is simple and prominent. The font and format, conceived by London’s Fieldwork Facility, resemble the flipping tiles on a vintage train station departures board.

Hauling every stone Buddha and electric guitar from storehouses across London was a mammoth task. Curators have reassembled the entire 15th-century Torrijos Ceiling, acquired from a palace outside Toledo, Spain, giving it a gallery unto itself, so visitors can contemplate its Arabic and Christian motifs from one of the original Isokon wood recliners. A 10×11-metre stage cloth painted by Picasso for the Ballet Russes hangs in a space three times the size — the world’s largest Picasso in one of the largest uninterrupted spaces in the V&A universe. This could never have been displayed in the South Kensington museum, a rambling palace broken up and stuffed with material.

There’s a larger story to tell about how they assembled an entire two-storey facade from the 1972 social housing project Robin Hood Gardens, currently being demolished. An icon of midcentury social-housing design rendered in concrete, it includes a stairwell and an audio element — new employees recruited from the neighbourhood have recorded oral histories and embedded them into the structure.

On the top floor is a glass-walled viewing gallery, where visitors can peer down into vaulted conservation studios to watch the process of cleaning and repairing items that may figure in a future exhibition. But the pièce de resistance is a plywood-panelled office space designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for department store-owner Edgar Kaufmann in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, recreated here intact. It found its way to the V&A in South Kensington after Kaufmann’s death, but was dismantled in the 1990s to make way for less cumbersome pieces.

Interactive exhibits like these give the Storehouse meaning, even urgency. ‘As museums accumulate more and more,’ says Diller, ‘the proportion of works on display will diminish over time. This is of huge concern.’

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