An innovative chapter is written in the history of museography and of the East Bank, London's sparkling new cultural district (as well as the city's largest cultural investment in recent years) located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London: on 31 May 2025 the V&A East Storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (with the collaboration of Austin-Smith:Lord), a detached pole from the Victoria and Albert Museum, will open in Here East. The V&A East Museum (designed by Dublin-based studio O'Donnell + Tuomey) will also be added in spring 2026.

The V&A East Storehouse is located in the former broadcast centre for the 2012 Olympics and includes 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives from the V&A's collection (ranging from architecture, design, fashion, sculpture and theatre), now housed in the Blythe House storehouse in West London. The building features an opaque, minimalist shell. It is distributed over four levels covering an area of 16,000 square metres and is eroded on the inside by a central void around which the storage/depot/exhibition spaces pivot in a weave of metal shelving and pathways.

Following in the footsteps of Mvrdv's Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the work is pioneering in the field of museography, proposing to “hybridise” the concept of exhibition space (for representation) with that of archive and repository (for technical and support purposes) and taking the visitor behind the scenes of the museum, to discover a heritage that is often not visible and now put within everyone's reach through a free, self-guided experience.

Tiny or cyclopean works dot and cross the space informally, overlapping in a scenic landscape that encourages the observer to browse and experiment. The rich array of objects ranges from the smallest curiosities to monumental works, almost never exhibited before because of their size: from Frank Lloyd Wright's 1930s office for Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr (Wright's only interior outside the US), to a section of the Smithsons' demolished Robin Hood Gardens, to the gigantic 11-metre-wide stage cloth designed by Pablo Picasso (his largest work in the world) for the 1924 production of the Ballets Russes ("Le Train Bleu").

In addition to the David Bowie Centre, the new home of David Bowie's archive containing some 90,000 objects, opening on 13 September 2025, the centre's other spaces will host temporary exhibitions, workshops, shows and initiatives focused on divulging the museum's “behind-the-scenes” activities, from conservation and research to the preparation of the exhibitions. To satisfy any desire for knowledge and curiosity, the “Order an Object” service will allow anyone to book and see any object of their choice on site, free of charge and seven days a week, from ancient Egyptian artefacts, to Memphis Group furniture, to “pop” sculptures.

As Elizabeth Diller, Founding Partner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, states: “To celebrate the heterogeneity of the V&A’s collection of collections—spanning a broad variety of mediums, scales, and historical periods—visitors will experience a sense of being immersed in a vast Cabinet of Curiosities. The Collections Hall invites visitors to explore pre-curated works surrounding them, not according to conventional curatorial logics or standard storage taxonomies but guided instead by their own curiosities. It has been a joy to work with the V&A’s curators and conservators in creating this new kind of institution: neither warehouse nor museum, but rather a hybrid shared by staff and the public with expanded opportunities for access and exchange”.

Ahead of the opening of the V&A East Storehouse, the Venice Biennale and the V&A present the special project “On Storage” in the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale 2025. Curated by Brendan Cormier, Chief Curator of V&A East, in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the exhibition features a glimpse into the V&A East Storehouse through photographs, architectural models and sketches, as well as a six-screen film directed by DS+R (“Boxed: The Mild Boredom of Order”) exploring the storage architecture through the journey of an everyday utility object – a toothbrush – from the macro-scale of a warehouse, to the hyper-compressed size of a travel trolley. Because after all, everything is art.