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

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.