London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, V&A to its friends, has long been a fixture in the cluster of museums in London’s South Kensington area, but in recent years it’s added spaces ‘out east’ to hold and display its huge collection—over 2.8 million objects—of applied arts, decorative arts and design.
A key piece of that has been the recently-opened V&A East Storehouse, near what was London’s Olympic Village in 2012. From the outside, the building looks a bit like a warehouse or self-storage place, but that hardly tells the tale of what’s inside.
Let’s start by what V&A East Storehouse is not. It’s not a museum, in any conventional sense. Nor is it really a warehouse or storage facility; to call it that would be like calling an airport a waiting room. An interactive sign, above, says more about how hard it is to encompass the building than it does about the contents.
Three floors and what seems like more of steel shelving, gridded floors and stairways link the public areas, which are threaded about the building around a central core that offers views all the way to the bottom—if you can take your eyes off the visible exhibits that constantly beg the question: “What IS that?”
And there’s help for that, too. Not only indexed binders here and there, but an app that allows more information by pointing at QR codes, at least where there are codes!
If the Smithsonian is ‘America’s Attic,’ this is surely the British equivalent, on steroids.
But back to the idea that this isn’t a museum nor a warehouse. It is more like a staging area for a show, with the museum itself as the theatre; here are all the stage settings and props needed for the theater’s repertoire of productions. Objects are drawn from here to form special or permanent exhibitions elsewhere.
But that’s also only a part of the Storehouse’s role. Its vast collections enable scholars, curators and others to study a wide variety of related (or not!) objects to learn more about how practical and decorative arts developed and influenced their cultures. The collection includes even objects not original, but now historic; the cast below, of an Egyptian architectural detail from the 13th century was made by a British archaeologist in the 19th.
The seeming incomplete structure just below actually houses the Torrijos Ceiling, a magnificent example of Moorish-influenced Spanish wood carving from about 1490; the man for whom it was made, is the one who introduced Ferdinand to Isabella. Note the reclining chairs placed under it to allow visits to look up without straining their necks!
The Storehouse also holds two unusual complete rooms exemplifying two different aspects of 20th century design: the Frankfurt Kitchen and the Kaufmann Office. The Frankfurt kitchen, designed by Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky, was designed to ease the work of housewives by making efficient use of a small space; ten thousand of them were installed in public housing in Frankfurt during the Weimar ears. You can read more about her and the kitchen in a TravelGumbo blog, Social Architecture: The Frankfurt Kitchen.
It’s a far cry from that kitchen to the office of department-store magnate Eugene Kaufmann, designed and custom-built in the 1930s by Frank Lloyd Wright with custom textiles woven by the atelier of Loja Saarinen. There’s more on Kaufmann’s office in our blog The Kaufmann Office: The Wright Stuff, which appears next week.
Despite what sometimes seems like random placement of objects in the Storehouse (and some of the placement is size-dependent), there’s an active coding and inventory system that tracks where everything is when it is needed.
The codes and inventory also back up the V&A’s ‘Order an Object’ program, which allows the public—not just scholars or students—to request up-close time with thousands of objects in the collection. Requests have to be placed in advance, the object evaluated for its safety, and then, by appointment, the visitor, a museum staffer and the object have close-up time.
It’s easy to spend hours at the Storehouse, tumbling down endless rabbit holes of “Oh, I remember that!” or “Can you imagine?” and more, what can really absorb time (it did for us!) is watching the curators and restorers at work in the conservation spaces that are visible through glass-enclosed walkways.
The staff in the picture above spent more than half an hour while we watched unpacking, unfolding, refolding, packing, making notes, mixing, matching and more. I’ve no idea what, specifically, they were working on but it was fascinating to watch.
There are rules—no coats or bags, no wet umbrellas and more—but you don’t have to worry about that security guard; he’s actually a costume display mannequin.
Historic houses, got them. Outsized instruments, got them. Colonnade from ancient India? It’s here. Even a flashy scooter…
Off and on over the past thirty years, I’ve meant to get to the V&A—the original—but now I’m not sure it could live up to this!
