78 V&A STOREHOUSE


PROJECT INFO V&A EAST STOREHOUSE


Client V&A Museum


Architecture Diller, Scofidio + Renfro with Austin-Smith: Lord


Engineering, structure services and lighting: Arup


Principal design advisers ORSA


EDUCATION, EDUCATION, education: such could be (and probably has been) the mantra of the team behind the V&A East Storehouse, given the degree to which this new hybrid – part museum, part archive – facilitates curiosity, knowledge and public engagement. Is this the new statement building for the late 2020s – one that looks like a bland shed from the outside but inside is an Aladdin’s cave of creative inspiration and all of it accessible to anyone who wishes to drop in and explore? Let’s hope so. It is also, to its carbon-friendly credit, a retrofit, an interior reinvention of a 16,000m2 building that housed the world’s media at the 2012 Olympics, on the edge of the Olympic Park in Stratford. Although greeted by simple, plate


glass entrance doors and sleek, functional, Douglas-fir joinery in the lobby and café (the antithesis of the V&A Kensington’s opulent entrance halls), the experience is far from dull. Moving through the glass airlock doors that protect the 250,000 objects, 1,000 archive items and 350,000 books, you have a choice of either a lift or staircase to ascend to the 20m-high Collections Hall, which is jaw-dropping in its scale and impact. All around you – and underneath – are four floors of V&A treasures. Even the ground floor assets are visible from this entrance hall’s steel floorplate through a large, glass section in the centre. Below it you can see the 17th-century Agra Colonnade, a remarkable relic from the Mughal fort at Agra, in Uttar Pradesh. Visible on the grid-like shelving, and


stretching away from you on every level (thanks to a display system designed by young London practice IDK) are such an eclectic pick ’n’ mix of treasures: here an exterior wall slab from the Robin Hood Gardens estate, there a gilt framed 17th-century masterpiece, a shrouded Balenciaga ballgown or tapestry from the V&A’s outstanding textile collection. There is even a reconstructed mosaic ceiling from Toledo’s 15th-century Torrejos Palace (the rest of it lost), complete with structural supports. It’s all about revealing the inner workings of the world of art and design, of conservation and collecting, and the inner life of this fascinating museum: conservators can be viewed restoring items in their laboratories; paintings, prints and


Interior shelving system design IDK


E5 Bakehouse Café design Thing Studio


AV design Hoare Lee


Cost consultant Gardiner & Theobald


Project management Colliers


Right The building is a retrofit, a reinvention of the one that housed the world’s media at the 2012 London Olympics.


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