V&A East Storehouse has opened in London, offering an experience that breaks away from the traditional concept of a museum. Located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, within the East Bank cultural quarter, this publicly accessible storage facility fuses conservation with exhibition, inviting us to explore the vast and heterogeneous collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum as in a huge Wunderkammer.

A work of the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with the local firm Austin-Smith:Lord, the Storehouse is a 16,000-square-meter construction rising four levels, taking over a section of the Olympics Media and Broadcast Centre, which was built for the 2012 Games. The building maintains its original industrial character and glazed facade. Inside, metal structures, glass, and exposed concrete work together in a visitor route that shows conservation laboratories, handling areas, and reading rooms. The more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives contained within are accessible to the public through a Order an Object service. Over a thousand orders have been placed since its launch, and the item most in demand is a 1954 evening dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga.

In the heart of the building is the monumental Weston Collections Hall, 20 meters high and crowned with translucent openings in the ceiling, with platforms and walkways giving panoramas of the collections. More than a hundred small exhibitions are viewable here, directly integrated into the storage systems, from Buddhist statues to PJ Harvey’s guitar and a model of the bowl containing the 2012 Olympic torch.

The Storehouse also shows six large-scale objects, among them: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann Office; a section of Robin Hood Gardens, the brutalist residential estate in East London which was demolished; one of the wooden ceilings of the long-gone 15th-century palace of Torrijos (Toledo); and Pablo Picasso’s largest work, an 11-meter-wide, 10-meter-high fabric designed in 1924 by the Málaga-born artist for the Serge Diaghilev-directed Ballets Russes production of Le train blue, on display in the David and Molly Lowell Borthwick Gallery, which was built expressly for the V&A’s collection of large textiles and theater backdrops.

The V&A East Storehouse is neither a traditional museum nor just a storage place; it is a hybrid access to culture. Its inauguration marks the completion of the first of two new cultural sites provided by the V&A in East London. The second one, the V&A East Museum, opens in 2026.