On June 3 I had the pleasure of visiting the newly opened Victoria & Albert East Storehouse, a new infrastructure located in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, east of London.

It is a large building of 16,000m2, designed by the Diller Scofidio+Renfro studio, which houses more than half a million cultural objects belonging to the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum of Art and Design.

The objects are sometimes presented in their own packing and conservation boxes, or arranged on tramex shelves typical of the repositories. At the same time, they are grouped in a didactic way, or around a specific theme, with informative posters to help visitors find their way around the galleries.

The center also has large-format installations, such as the curtain signed by Picasso for the Russian ballets, the coffered ceiling of the now disappeared Torrijos Palace in Toledo or Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann office, and a “study” space where up to 5 objects can be viewed individually on demand, if requested in advance.

Halfway between a warehouse and a museum, this installation (like the Depot Boijmans in Rotterdam) represents an interesting variant within collection centers: one that houses a large number of objects in a densified space (as in a warehouse), but open to the public and relatively musealized to allow direct observation (as in a museum).

Although there are already more or less timid examples of visitable warehouses, they are smaller and more restricted spaces, so that we are clearly facing a new experience for the visitor that enriches the modalities of enjoyment of heritage.