V&A East Storehouse makes the museum's hidden storage the exhibition

Much of the V&A's collection sat in Blythe House, a west-London store closed to the public, and the building's disposal forced a move to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as the museum built its East Bank presence. The question was what kind of home to build for 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives — a closed warehouse, or something public.

Turn the museum's back-of-house into the front-of-house: an open working storehouse where live storage, conservation and research are the exhibition.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with Austin-Smith:Lord, converted part of the former London 2012 Olympics media centre into a 16,000-square-metre Storehouse on four levels. Visitors enter a 20-metre-high Weston Collections Hall formed by three concentric rings of access: open storage, a semi-public archive, and staff-only conservation at the core. Over 100 changing displays are hacked into the ends of racking, giant objects anchor the hall, conservation studios open to visitor overlooks, and an 'Order an Object' service lets anyone book to see any object free, seven days a week.

The Storehouse opened free to all on 31 May 2025 after about ten years of planning, turning a collections relocation into a new kind of public museum. In May 2026 ADC named it Best of Discipline in Architecture/Interior/Environmental Design, with a Gold Cube, for V&A and its design team.

The V&A is a national museum of art, design and performance whose collections outgrew its display galleries long ago; much of what it owns has spent decades in closed stores. One of them, Blythe House in west London, was being disposed of, forcing the museum to find a new home for 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives just as it was building a new East Bank presence in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The decision was what kind of home to build. Rather than reproduce a hidden warehouse, the V&A and New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro made the store itself the museum: a 'working storehouse' where visitors walk through live storage and see staff conserving, researching and moving the collection in real time. Elizabeth Diller described the result as 'neither warehouse nor museum, but rather a hybrid shared by staff and the public.'

Inside the converted 2012 Olympics media centre, a 20-metre-high Weston Collections Hall forms the centre of a building organised as three concentric rings of access: open crates nearest the public, a semi-public archive beyond, and staff conservation and deep storage at the core. Over 100 changing displays are 'hacked' into the ends of storage racking, so objects rotate on and off display more easily, and monumental pieces long hidden by their size — a 10-by-11-metre Picasso stage cloth, Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office, an 18-tonne 17th-century colonnade — anchor the space.

The building also inverts who chooses what visitors see: an 'Order an Object' service lets anyone book to view any object in the collection free, seven days a week, while glass overlooks and live cameras turn conservation studios into public windows on care and repair. V&A East Storehouse opened free to all on 31 May 2025 after about ten years of planning, and in May 2026 ADC gave it Best of Discipline in Architecture/Interior/Environmental Design plus a Gold Cube.

Making storage the exhibit removed the collection's biggest barrier — invisibility — so access itself became the product rather than a curatorial bonus.

Three concentric rings of access let the museum show real working life without compromising care, security or the objects themselves.

'Order an Object' inverted the museum visit: instead of waiting for curators' choices, any visitor can pull any object out of the collection.

Reusing the Olympic media centre and hacking displays into racking kept the project about the collection, not about a new architectural monument.

When a back-office function has to move, treat the constraint as the brief: the V&A turned a storage relocation into a reason to expose its hidden work, making conservation itself the attraction.

V&A East Storehouse opened free on 31 May 2025 and became a reference for 'open storage' in museums and architecture press. The David Bowie Centre, housing the star's archive, opened inside it in September 2025. At ADC 105 in May 2026 the project won a Gold Cube and Best of Discipline in Architecture/Interior/Environmental Design for the V&A with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Austin-Smith:Lord and Fieldwork Facility; the larger V&A East museum was scheduled to follow in spring 2026.