It’s difficult to imagine an architecture further from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s South Kensington home than that of its new venue, the Storehouse. When the Victorians built a cultural landscape, they did not mess about. They created a group of buildings and institutions so massive and monumental it is difficult to think of them ever disappearing. They will make magnificent ruins.
When, however, the London of the early 21st century built its cultural quarter, this time from the toxic industrial landscape of east London, they made something very different. Instead of a piece of city it was more a collection of things in a park surrounded by as yet non-existent (although now very existent) developers’ spec towers. One of those buildings was a media centre, sitting on the site of a former dog-racing stadium. Almost a 1,000ft long, profoundly utilitarian, it was destined to become that most dismal of architectural archetypes, a data centre.
Instead something much more interesting has happened. The V&A has taken a big chunk of it and stored part of its vast archive there. Museum storage is almost always in nondescript warehouses, usually in anonymous industrial parks. But what the museum has done here is not the usual secretive and secure warehousing. Rather they have made it into a spectacle; a spectacle of storage. The architects are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a New York-based practice that has been experimenting with different approaches to cultural space for decades and whose work includes New York’s High Line and Shed and LA’s Broad Museum. At the Broad, a decade ago, they were already exposing the storage at the heart of the building by giving visitors a glimpse into its racks. Now, in Stratford, they have eliminated the exterior presence altogether and created a cultural warehouse.
Visitors arrive at an unassuming entrance marked only by a supergraphic V&A sign. A lobby is equally modest, resembling a relaxed co-working space. They then ascend a stair (it does seem a little inaccessible to start with a stair) and are thrust right into the storage space, squeezed between two stacks of classical busts, from antique to modern, braced and seatbelted on their wooden pallets.
From there a gantry takes them on into the vast space, surrounded entirely by racks of stuff. If the exterior seems purely functional, this interior is theatrical, a device for suggesting the sheer scale of the collection. A few exhibits have been strategically placed to create moments of revelation; an intricately carved dome from a palace near Toledo (the Torrijos Ceiling, 1490s); a chunk of the concrete facade of the late 1960s/early 1970s brutalist Robin Hood Gardens housing estate from nearby Poplar; a wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright timber-lined 1930s office interior (which I last saw in the 1990s and has been in storage ever since) and a tiny pioneering 1920s Frankfurt Kitchen by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, a condensed example of pure modernist functionalism. And, below your feet and visible via a glass floor panel, a section of the 17th-century marble Agra Colonnade from Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s bathhouse. Another huge space allows a display of large artefacts, for now a large painted stage front cloth from 1924 based on a Picasso painting for the Ballets Russes.
Most of what you see, however, is just stuff, the brown furniture of the museum world. There are chests inlaid with marquetry, majolica and mopeds, paintings, hardware, clocks, sewing machines, guitars and injection-moulded plastic chairs. If it was in a vitrine you’d walk right past it but oddly here everything looks like a find, more intriguing, like a treasure unearthed in a junk shop.
Mini-displays allow curators to show what they are currently working on or thinking about, little ensembles of curious objects which, together, tell a story. Tim Reeve, the V&A’s deputy director, whose baby this very much is, points out a case of four stelae, funerary markers with human heads carved in stone which are here for safekeeping, awaiting their return to Yemen, having been intercepted after likely being looted, an unexpected story of objects in limbo. “There’s a desire here to be a bit more responsive, more spontaneous,” Reeve tells me. “We’re expecting a younger audience here, one which might be a little intimidated by a museum so we’re trying to make it more immediate.”
The sense that you are in a back-of-house space is, of course, itself an artifice. But it works. There are viewing gantries looking down into conservation workshops and there will be staff moving objects around, to go on display or on loan, to be repaired or to be returned. That is the idea, says Reeve, to get an idea of the museum not as a static, secretive institution but as a place of everyday work and study, observation and movement. Visitors will be able also to order up items in advance from the archive, making this huge collection of 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and almost 1,000 separate archives genuinely fully accessible for the first time. The David Bowie Collection, currently being built inside, will open soon as well.
Architecturally this is as much the world of Ikea or the distribution centre as it is the world of museums. The racks are, according to the architects, pretty much the same as those in commercial warehousing and DIY stores. It is also very much in the vanguard of a global shift in thinking about museums in which archives are being dragged out into the light. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Depot in Rotterdam got there first but that was a much smaller scheme and more carefully choreographed. Museums are often criticised for showing so little of what they have in store (particularly when facing claims about restitution, as keeping objects in storage undermines the case for retention) and the hierarchies of selection, of elite objects being picked above others, are becoming unfashionable.
Twenty-five years ago Tate Modern opened to almost universal acclaim. In a way, it changed everything. The idea of reuse of a structure, once quite marginal, now seems not only reasonable but inescapable. Here, a banal building has been imbued with magic with its piling up of things, Citizen Kane style, each object seemingly re-enchanted. But more than that, this strategy absolves the museum from the burden of creating an identity.
The V&A already has an image in South Kensington; this intervention smartly elides the inescapable issue of the icon by being all about the interior. I think it may prove to be as important to the museum as Tate Modern was 25 years ago. It represents a huge shift in museology; the deliberate revelation of the process. Curators, conservators, art movers and handlers, for so long hidden away, are being acknowledged. I’d suggest that this building is that rare thing in culture: a genuinely radical work in which the architects have sublimated their ego and retreated into the background to give way to process and the spectacle of the artefacts themselves to create a new and very contemporary kind of museum.
Opens May 31. vam.ac.uk/east
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