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Want to take a closer look at a life-size recreation of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufmann Office? Examine a 17th century marble colonnade from Mughal India? Or study ‘Train Bleu’, a stage front cloth depicting a rare Pablo Picasso artwork that impressed the artist so much, he signed the fabric? It’s all possible at the 16,000sqm working museum archive, which is also the home to David Bowie’s personal archive, its popularity matched only by a 1954 balloon-hemmed Cristóbal Balenciaga gown whose boning inspired the architecture of the new V&A East museum nearby.
When the V&A East Storehouse opened last May, it put the public in the curatorial chair. You can now pre-order anything you might like to see – and, in some cases, touch – from a repository that consists of 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives covering a breadth of creative expression across the ages, that would’ve otherwise remained in storage, unseen.
Putting the inner workings of a museum on display is a radical idea, but how does one do so without compromising the integrity of its collection? The New-York based architecture practise Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who famously transformed a disused railway line in NYC into the High Line – a raised public park – that put the Meatpacking District on the map, were assigned the ambitious task of remodelling the former London 2012 Olympics Media and Broadcast Centre (now Here East) to create a space that would be fit for this nationally important collection.
In developing the concept for the V&A East Storehouse, the studio was driven by functionality not aesthetics. ‘This is not scenography – it’s a working building,’ explains Elizabeth Diller, partner-in-charge of the project. ‘We wanted people to be breathing the same air as the artefacts, so we removed the usual prophylactic between the visitor and the work.'
Their proposal turned the conventional museum organisation on its head, inviting the one directly into the Collections Hall – a 21st century cabinet of curiosities, if you will – with display platforms jutting out across multiple levels of the atrium, enticing one to come closer. The design takes inspiration from the visual language of everyday museum operations – the roller storage units, shelving, forklifts and rare works – and puts this back-of-house on display. The inner layer exposes open crates to the public, the middle layer acts as a semi-public archive and the outermost layer contains private spaces for conservation, research, and deep storage.
‘To realise the project, everyone had to step out of their comfort zone,’ says David Allin, principal and project director. ‘Curators became storage experts, technical services staff acted as exhibition designers, and we, as architects, learned to be collection managers. This experiment continues, with the public now asked to invent their own way of exploring the V&A’s collection of remarkable things.'
‘From the very start we were clear that we wanted to remove every barrier from the public being able to access these kinds of objects,’ explains Kate Parsons, director of conservation, collections care & access at Victoria and Albert Museum. ‘We want the access to be easy, equitable, safe and meaningful.’ By taking the historic requirement of ‘credentials’ to access museum archives out of the picture, the V&A East Storehouse is sparking not only curiosity, but also the imagination. ‘We’re getting a lot of young people who are coming to discover things when they're starting their careers,' explains Kate. ‘And to be able to do that in east London, very much because of the history of east London, in terms of makers, creators and cultural exchange, is very special.’ The V&A East Storehouse is free to visit. Click here to find out more; dsrny.com
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