In last week’s Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to ‘get these works out’. There’s an alternative solution: bring the public in. V&A East Storehouse, which opened last weekend, was designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro to do just that.
The museum’s collections were previously holed up in the creaking, late-Victorian Blythe House. The government decided to sell it in 2015, leading the V&A to find a new home in the Olympics’s former Broadcasting Centre in Hackney Wick, a big box since rebadged as Here East, an ‘innovation campus’. The Storehouse’s entrance indeed blends in with the startups and students sharing the building. With its techy-twee café and plywood-clad reception, it could be yet another co-working space. Yet a glimpse through the glass soon suggests otherwise.
After passing through an airlock, I enter a tunnel-like walkway, lined with shelves of objects: a bust of Christ, a carved teak shrine from Ahmedabad, and a chair by Marcel Breuer. In the absence of any curatorial logic, the objects are placed according to their storage requirements, and mounted on to pallets with bespoke fixings that carefully hold the objects in place for shipping. In one way the space is an overdue recognition of the once invisible labour of art handlers.
The Storehouse is utilitarian. But its sparing flourishes count, namely by welcoming visitors through the underbelly of the central hall. I emerge in the middle of a climactic triple-height space, encircled by walkways, crowned by a plane of light. Rows of ordinary warehouse shelving extend in all three dimensions, including below, via the glass floor.
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