The V&A East Storehouse will open to the public for the first time on Saturday, 31 May 2025. Located in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the project is part of East Bank, a new cultural quarter supported by the Mayor of London. Designed by the internationally recognized architecture firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the new facility serves as both a working store and a visitor destination. Following a decade of planning and extensive audience consultation, V&A East Storehouse is the first of V&A East's two new cultural destinations to open in East London. The second, V&A East Museum, is scheduled to open in spring 2026 and will explore the role of making and creativity as agents of change.
Located within the repurposed London 2012 Olympics Media and Broadcast Centre, now known as Here East, the V&A East Storehouse aims to introduce a new type of museum experience across four levels and 16,000 m², equivalent in size to more than 30 basketball courts. Housing over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives, the facility positions itself as one of the most extensive museum stores globally in both scale and ambition. Designed as a working museum store, the project offers a self-guided experience that allows visitors to engage directly with the national collections across a wide spectrum of creative disciplines, including fashion, theatre, streetwear, sculpture, design, and popular culture.
The V&A East Storehouse, a 16,000-square-metre facility, integrates public access into the museum's working storage infrastructure, establishing a new typology for cultural institutions. From the street-level entrance, visitors pass through a walkway embedded within dense storage racks, leading to the Weston Collections Hall, a 20-metre-high central volume situated at the core of the facility. This central space functions as a void extracted from a solid mass, with objects arranged in all directions, including below a glass floor. The spatial organization consists of three concentric layers. The innermost zone is publicly accessible and features open storage crates. Surrounding this is a semi-public archive layer, and the outermost zone accommodates private functions including conservation, research, and deep storage. This layout reverses conventional museum configurations by placing the most publicly accessible areas at the core and the most restricted at the periphery. Smaller zones are designated for both public programs and back-of-house operations.
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The project also introduces "Order an Object," a service that allows visitors to select and view specific items from the V&A's extensive collection. With access to over half a million works, visitors can book appointments to see up to five objects, offering a personalized experience for research or creative inspiration. Additionally, Object Encounters provide daily opportunities for small groups to engage with objects not typically on display, guided by Collections Access staff. In the Weston Collections Hall, six large-scale objects, including the Kaufmann Office by Frank Lloyd Wright and a 15th-century gilded ceiling from Toledo, are displayed with 360-degree access. These initiatives bring new perspectives to the displays, integrating contemporary narratives with the museum's historical collections.
The V&A East Storehouse is also currently on view in Venice as part of On Storage, the special project for the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025. Presented by La Biennale di Venezia and the V&A, the exhibition features large-scale photographs of the Storehouse, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's original architectural model and sketchbook, and behind-the-scenes photography of the facility at work.
In other news from Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the office unveiled the design for Therme Dubai earlier this year. Created in collaboration with Therme Group and Dubai Municipality, the project has been approved as part of Dubai's Quality of Life Strategy 2033, and is scheduled to begin in 2026, with completion expected by 2028. Again, earlier this year, the firm revealed the design for the Pardee School Mass Timber Tower at Boston University, a 70,000-square-foot building that will rise 186 feet, making it the tallest mass timber tower in the Northeast United States. Commissioned in 2020, the project is scheduled for completion in 2027.
