This London Museum Lets You ‘Order’ Objects From Its Vast Collections—and Maybe Even Touch Them
At the new V&A East Storehouse, visitors can get up close and personal with 250,000 historic and culturally significant items spanning 5,000 years of human creativity
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Museumgoers typically only get to see a fraction of an institution’s vast collections. Everything else is tucked safely away in storage, only to be seen by curators.
But the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London is trying something new. Last month, the museum debuted a novel space that allows visitors to enjoy even more of its historic and culturally significant pieces spanning 5,000 years of human creativity.
The museum has transformed a warehouse into a climate-controlled exhibition and research venue called the V&A East Storehouse. There, guests can get an up-close look at more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and 1,000 archives—without any ropes, protective glass or guards keeping them at a distance, according to the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless.
Located at the site of the 2012 Summer Olympics, the building is “a love letter to objects,” says Georgia Haseldine, senior curator for the V&A East Storehouse, to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Quick facts: The V&A’s vast collections
- Founded in 1852, the V&A houses more than 1.7 million objects.
- Visitors to the new storehouse can select from more than 250,000 items.
“To be able to see around the back of an object, to be able to look inside a dress, to be able to see the bottom of a pot, all these things are how we really learn about our material culture,” she adds.
The items are arranged randomly on rows of metal shelves, without regard for their geographical origins, time period or medium. (Some onlookers have compared the design to an Ikea furniture store.) Visitors can also peruse more than 100 small curated displays on the sides and ends of the shelves.
Many objects are being seen by the public for the first time in years—like Aleksandr Shervashidze’s stage-cloth copy of Pablo Picasso’s Two Women Running Along the Beach (The Race), which bears Picasso’s signature but hasn’t been shown in more than a decade.
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The whole setup “makes you feel closer to art, as if you owned it—which is as it should be with a national collection,” writes Jonathan Jones for the Guardian. Writing for the London Times, Nancy Durrant echoes that sentiment, adding that the endeavor feels “quietly radical.”
That’s exactly what the V&A East Storehouse’s creators were going for. By giving members of the public nearly unfettered access to the objects, they had hoped that the space would “bring more ownership of the collection,” says Matthew Clarke, the venue’s technical manager, to Livingetc’s Gilda Bruno and Leah Renz.
More broadly, the storehouse represents a new path forward for museum collections. An estimated 97 percent of a museum’s artifacts are in storage at any given time, according to Elizabeth Diller, co-founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the company that helped design the new V&A East Storehouse. As she tells CNN’s Leah Dolan, the proportion of works on view is likely to get even smaller as museums accumulate more and more items, unless they build new wings to display them.
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If visitors would like to get an even closer look at an artifact—or possibly even touch it—they can “order” it for delivery to a special room. Conservationists will meet them there, hand them a pair of purple gloves and show them how to handle the object properly, per AFP.
Requests must be made at least two weeks in advance via an online booking portal. Some objects are only available for viewing and cannot be touched, but guests can request up to five items at a time, so long as they are located at the same venue (either the V&A East Storehouse or V&A South Kensington), according to the museum’s website. Visitors are also able to bring a guest to their object-viewing appointment.
One of the most requested items? A fuchsia 1954 Cristóbal Balenciaga gown with silk taffeta, per W magazine’s Alison S. Cohn.
So far, individuals requesting objects have ranged from students at the London College of Fashion to brides seeking inspiration for their wedding dresses. Some have even made reservations to celebrate their birthdays.
“Any reason to view the collection is a good reason,” Kate Parsons, director of conservation, collections care and access, tells W magazine.
