Buddhas, a medieval ceiling and the David Bowie archive are among 600,000 gloriously random objects stacked high and low in an immersive new storage space for the V&A, designed to ‘lean into the delirium’
Let’s start with the smell. There is, as you penetrate the big metal shed that contains the V&A’s new Storehouse in east London, a slight aroma of dry must, of microscopic traces of (presumably) old wood and leather, of stone, clay, cloth and anything else that the more than 600,000 objects kept here might be made of, together with whatever chemicals and preparations are used to finish and preserve them. You, the visitor, share the same atmosphere as the objects, few of which are placed behind glass.
This scent is an effect and accomplice of the project’s big idea, which is to present artefacts as directly as possible to the public. The building’s interior looks like the world’s most glorious antique shop, multilayered in every direction, its boundaries blurred by stuff, a brocante of marvels from many millennia and continents, which range in scale from buttons and pins to whole rooms and pieces of buildings. The hope is that people will find their own way and alight on whatever they fancy, without too much direction or instruction. Objects are allowed to speak for themselves.
The primary function of V&A East Storehouse, to give its full name, is to store. It is the new home of the V&A’s reserve collections, which, much like similar troves in other major museums, outnumber the items on public display in the main venues by a factor of more than 25. These have to be protected from decay and damage, while being reachable if needed for exhibition and research. But the new facility also grasps the opportunity to put at least some of the bottom part of this museological iceberg on show. It’s an absurdity going on outrage that such treasures, publicly owned and cared for at public expense, can’t usually be seen, so full credit goes to the V&A for addressing the issue.
The origin of Storehouse, which opened yesterday, is in the government’s 2015 decision to close and sell off Blythe House, the rambling late Victorian ex-headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in west London, which had been acquired in 1979 as the main store for the British Museum, Science Museum and the V&A. The latter, after a search for suitable new locations for their collections, settled on the media centre built for the 30,000 journalists who came to cover the 2012 London Olympic Games. Storehouse occupies 16,000 sq metres of the complex, which is shared with an “innovation and technology campus” called Here East.
The building stands close to the new V&A East Museum, due to open next year, and in reach of large and diverse audiences in the surrounding boroughs. Externally it’s pragmatic, a long, dark oblong on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. There is nothing by way of classical porticoes or expressionist architectural forms – just some signage – to tell you that this houses a national cultural institution. There’s no front desk on entry, just a long white room off to the right, with colourful seating and a cafe at the end.
The architects of the project are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the New York practice known for their contribution to the design of that city’s celebrated High Line and their work at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Here, though, there is no celebrity signature – just the application of architectural intelligence to the organisation of the whole. The design is about making experiences possible rather than drawing attention to itself. The aim, says Liz Diller, who with her late partner, Ric Scofidio, founded the practice, was to design Storehouse “from the inside out”. It is filled with as much stuff as possible, helped by the insertion of two additional floors, except for a galleried triple-height void hollowed out of its centre, which she calls an “immersive cabinet of curiosities”. Here, as in the wunderkammern of Renaissance Europe, wildly disparate objects, arranged in no particular order, jostle for attention. “The collection is so crazy,” says Diller, “we wanted to lean into the delirium.”
There are oil paintings, buddhas, a Vespa, road signs, dresses, chessboards, vases, books, busts, cabinets decorated with gilt and marquetry, glazed bowls, a huge Picasso stage cloth. There is the Torrijos ceiling, an ornate work of combined Islamic and Christian styles, from 15th-century Toledo. There is the pioneer fitted kitchen designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for a 1926 social housing project in Frankfurt. Commanding the middle of the space are two storeys of concrete panels salvaged from the demolition of the brutalist Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, behind them reconstructed sections of its flats, animated by videoed recollections of its residents. There will be the David Bowie archive, opening in September, with a display by the architects and designers IDK.
It’s an absurdity going on outrage that such treasures can’t usually be seen
The collection is all around you – even, thanks to a partly glass floor, beneath your feet. Aisles of storage, which the architects call “tributaries”, head off towards the more functional (but still visible) outer reaches of the facility. Items are exhibited with no or little captioning, although some will come with QR codes through which you can access further information. Many objects are displayed in the crates in which they are moved, opened up for the benefit of the public, with the ingenious braces and fillers that protect them from damage left in place. They are placed on standard steel shelves, arranged by scale and type rather than historical style. “What’s nice about the stacking system,” says Diller, “is that it doesn’t really understand the difference between periods, just weight and size.”
Storehouse displays the joy of making – not just of the exhibits, but also the craft that goes into conserving, storing and moving fragile works, even the arrangement of its visible air ducts. The rough softwood frames that hold up the historic interiors are on view and visitors can see conservators at work in one of their studios. The place also captures some of the magic of going behind the scenes, the “privilege” that Diller says she felt when first viewing the collections, the feeling “that we weren’t meant to be there but we were there”.
The project’s lack of ceremony is not entirely artless. There’s thought in some of the juxtapositions, and in their lighting and arrangement. There are what the museum calls “mini-curated displays” in among the racking. The beauty of Storehouse is in the combination of function and wonder: on the one hand it’s an endless archive out of a Jorge Luis Borges story; on the other, it’s a high-end Amazon distribution centre. Which is not a bad outcome for an endeavour driven by expediency – the need to find a new home after eviction from Blythe House.
Photographs © Hufton+Crow/V&A
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