Diller Scofidio + Renfro completes V&A East Storehouse in London

By Starr Charles

American studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro has completed V&A East Storehouse, the publicly accessible working storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Built as part of the East Bank cultural quarter in the Queen Elizabeth Park, the 16,000-square-metre facility houses 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives, and is set to open to the public this weekend.

It forms the first of two new cultural venues being created by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in east London, with the V&A East Museum scheduled to open in spring 2026.

V&A East Storehouse is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro as a new model for museum storage.

Its design included the overhaul of a large section of the Here East hangar – an industrial media complex originally built as the broadcasting centre for the 2012 London Olympics.

“We basically just built on the industrial feel [of the building],” studio co-founder Elizabeth Diller told Dezeen during a preview of the building.

“It is built strong and really simple. The periphery is solid – it doesn’t have windows and has a very deep floor plate,” added Diller. “It was the perfect blank slate to do something with.”

“The building, as we inherited, lent itself to this very easy adaptation and anchoring of new walkways and structures,” continued studio principal David Allin.

Externally, the building’s glazed facade remains largely untouched, with a black tower used to signpost the facility’s entrance.

This space opens up to a lobby, off of which an entrance hall runs along the building’s front, providing a cafe and work space complete with an open-plan seating area.

From here, a centralised staircase guides visitors from the lobby into the main hall, flanked by rows of metal storage racks that double as displays.

At the programme’s centre, the interior opens up to the Weston Collections Hall, held within a 20-metre-high void crowned with translucent roof openings.

A spacious platform occupies the centre of this space, serving as a viewing area overlooking its three upper floors and below through a glazed floor opening. Racks filled with artefacts extend outwards in every direction, with views across the vast collection enabled by mesh metal grating flooring and glass guardrails.

“We decided right at the beginning that we wanted light right at the core as the public space,” Diller explained. “It was a way of domesticating the building by making it a public space and giving it a centre because it was centreless.”

Six large-scale objects were chosen as permanent pieces within the space, including a suspended fragment of the Robin Hood Gardens – a brutalist residential estate in east London that was demolished.

Also on display is the 18-tonne Agra Colonnade, an “extraordinary example of 17th-century Mughal architecture”, which runs along the restricted ground-floor collection space.

The facility is navigated via concentric layers, with the building’s inner area designed for visitors and the outer layers reserved for deep storage and private access. Bridges peel off from the central area at each level to provide views overlooking these restricted spaces.

A staircase leading up from the central void provides access to the building’s upper floors, where additional spaces include multipurpose studios finished with glass walls to allow visitors to observe activities.

Elsewhere, Diller Scofidio + Renfro recently unveiled its On Storage exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated in collaboration with the V&A. It features photos, drawings and models of the storehouse, as well as a film directed by the studio.

Also at the event, the studio created the demountable La Libreria and a filtration system that uses canal water to make coffee.

The photography is by Hufton+Crow.

This article is originally available at www.dezeen.com