Behind the Curtain: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Radical Reimagining of the Museum Archive

“I love everything that’s shrouded—when I don’t know what is underneath,” says architect Liz Diller, when asked about her favorite objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Storehouse in east London, designed by her firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. We meet there before its opening, intended to lift the metaphorical shroud shielding museum collections from the public. The 172-year-old Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) holds almost 2.8 million objects, yet only 3 percent are ever displayed—a reminder that museums are often repositories first, galleries second. Can this change? This institution attempts to answer that question by making the enjoyment of collections today as crucial as their preservation for the future. “These two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive,” Diller says.

V&A East Represent a New Museum Typology

The opportunity arose when the V&A had to evacuate Blythe House, the storage facility it had occupied since the 1980s. Instead of a simple move, it developed a new typology alongside the upcoming V&A East, on the capital’s former Olympic Park. It took over the redundant 172,222 sq. ft. (16,000 m2) Media Centre for the 2012 Games, adapting it with two aims in mind: collections care and unfettered public access.

“It’s organized in concentric rings,” Diller explains. “The center is most public, the next layer semi-public, the outer layer private—a total inversion.” From the street, you enter through a plain doorway on the side of a warehouse. This leads into a reception area with casual seating and a cafe—its raw informality, exposed ducts, and pipes embrace its structure’s industrial qualities. The magic begins when you ascend the stairs: you emerge at the heart of the warehouse surrounded on all sides by storage racks filled with 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives—soaring three stories above and down through a glass floor beneath. “Symbolically, it’s a generous, brilliant move,” says V&A deputy director Tim Reeve, comparing it to the typical process of entering secure spaces—waiting at a barrier and looking through thick glass. The trick, he adds, was balancing openness with wonder: “You want people to feel welcome but also experience the magic being behind the curtain—almost trespassing.”

The joy lies not in aesthetics but in functionality. “This is not scenography—it’s a working building,” Diller says. Racking systems don’t care about the beauty of an object, its size, weight, and movement. The objects themselves are the stars, of course. Climb through the building to get up close and personal with everything from carved Italian wedding chests from the 1400s to ancient carved Yemeni funerary stones that were recently found in a shop in east London—often, these are stacked unassumingly, occasionally in curated displays with messages from staff. Built into the structure are several large architectural objects: a two-story fragment of the 1970s social housing development Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson; Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kauffman office; the fifteenth-century carved Torrijos ceiling from southern Spain. In the back rooms, you can watch conservators at work or discover treasures such as the largest Picasso in the world, a stage cloth for the 1924 ballet Le Train Bleu.

Transparency to Increase Relevancy and Social Impact

It is about visibility rather than display—things simply are where they are, not categorized by department or era. They will remain in flux as objects go out on loan or conservation and others return. A radical new library-like system allows you to “order an object” online for viewing within two weeks, removing the bureaucracy usually involved in accessing such things for curators, researchers, and the public alike. Reeve describes it as an “enormous search engine.”

The Storehouse is designed to fulfill the outward-facing role increasingly expected of publicly funded institutions, particularly as this iteration of the V&A is in a vibrantly creative but historically impoverished part of east London rather than its rarefied original location. In this very openness, Reeve says, the museum hopes to resolve the question of future legacy. “The more people understand what goes into looking after a collection, the more they will value it: being relevant protects it for the future.”

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• Debika Ray
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• Hufton + Crown
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