V&A East: Lifting the Curtain on Museum Display

Lifting The Curtain – The What And How of Display At The V&A East

Metal bracing, mesh wall panels, palettes and crates – not an East London industrial warehouse, but the V&A Museum's latest museum destination, filled with 250,000 objects and 350,000 books from the archives, and completely open to the public. And I mean completely. Gone are the usual glass walls and display boxes of the museum floor. Here, visitors can roam on a self-guided tour between aisles of porcelain statues and pre-Raphaelite vases within touching distance. In this revolutionary form of display, visitors and objects share the same oxygen, the same physical space. The new layout, designed by New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro ("DS+R") with help from the UK-based Austin-Smith:Lord, is a complete subversion of the usual public-private dynamics that dictate museum curation. "We're peeling back the curtain, showing how museums actually function," describes Brendan Cormier, V&A East's Chief Curator and COO. With its design language of transport and operations, the architectural structure speaks to the way behind-the-scenes decisions of curation contribute to public storytelling. Visitors can even watch professionals engage in the preservation and restoration process of items over a balcony at the Conservation Overlook section. "New acquisitions, conservation decisions, loans, categorisation and sorting systems, and deaccessions – these all speak to the making and remaking of culture alongside public exhibitions," describes David Allin, the project's architect. "By exposing these otherwise hidden objects, systems and activities to the public, the idea of exhibition and display is significantly broadened."