V&A East Storehouse by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The V&A East Storehouse introduces a groundbreaking model for museum practice by transforming a former broadcasting facility built for the 2012 Summer Olympics into an open, working, public landscape of its storage archives. Located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Storehouse marks a paradigm shift in conventional museum thinking by merging storage, archive, and exhibition space into a new type of institution.

Inspired by the eclectic nature of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities – a type of encyclopedic display that originated in sixteenth-century Europe and preceded the advent of the modern museum – the new facility invites visitors to explore the collection against the grain of typical curatorial logic and standard taxonomies. Through this transformation of a disused office building into a vast and intimate cultural space, the public has a unique opportunity to embark on a behind-the-scenes journey to understand how objects are collected, cared for, conserved, and researched, encouraging a collective exploration of how artifacts and architecture help make sense of our past, present, and future.