The inside-out strategy turns the museum on its head

The Guardian called the newly-opened V&A East Storehouse in the Olympic Park in London ‘The national museum of absolutely everything’. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but with 250,000 artefacts on display, it comes pretty close.

The idea of opening up a museum depot to the public gaze is not new. The  Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opened in Rotterdam in 2021, billing itself  ‘The world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility’ (see our earlier review here). The Rotterdam Depot holds a mere 154,000 artworks, ‘arranged not by period or art movement but based on the objects’ climate requirements.’ This concept helped to inspire the V&A version, but the claims of uniqueness are a bit overblown.

Outside the Booijmans Depot

In fact, museums have been developing their storage facilities as an extension of their activities for a long time. An article by Kristina Rapacki traces the long history of depot revelation. She argues that originally, museums just put everything they had on show, which was fine until they ran out of wall space. As collections grew, fuelled by colonial ‘acquisitions’, the need for extra storage increased. By 1912 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston divided its collections between ‘beautiful things’ on public show, and a ‘storage exhibition’ in the basement, which was also open to ‘anyone wishing to enter’.

Museum storage, usually in the basement, was long regarded as the preserve of museum staff and serious scholars. In 1974, Pontus Hultén, the director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm opened a study collection to the public. In 2005, he also donated his personal art collection to the museum, on the condition that it would be displayed in a new purpose‑built storage system, “a kind of ‘art jukebox’”. Numerous other museums have followed this lead, opening up their depots to a greater or lesser extent.

Dutch museums have been at the forefront of the inside-out trend. In 2002 the Amsterdam Museum began opening up its reserve collections in Amsterdam Noord to visitors. Many other Dutch museums followed this example, with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam following in 2009 and the Kolleksjesintrum Fryslân  in 2013.

But the idea has also been developed in many other places. The Schaulager in Basel in Switzerland combines storing, studying and presenting art. The storage is arranged so that artworks remain accessible for study when they not on show. The name derives from the combination of "schauen" and "lagern" – "seeing" and "storing". Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Schaulager opened in 2003. There is a monthly guided tour in English and German, which explains the Schaulager concept and provides an introduction in the collection.

The DDR Museum in Berlin a visit to their depot with a guided tour (€5) or without a guided tour (€3) – in groups accompanied by a museum employee. In Heusenstamm, a small toen near Frankfurt, you can visit the Museum of Communication Depot. This features over 375,000 artifacts, from vintage TVs to historic vehicles, which you can visit on a 1.5-hour guided tour (in German only).

Another model of depot access is the visitable reserve collection, such as the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món in Barcelona. The basement houses a storage space where “you can enjoy a wide variety of heritage items kept by the museum. There are approximately 3,250 exhibits on display, distributed in 46 display cases by materials, subdivided by geographical origin and the conditions needed for their preventative conservation.”

As Marzia Loddo  points out, “A depot is not just a fun way for visitors to have a peak behind the scenes. It also offers advantages of sustainability, because new buildings tend to be more cost and energy efficient”. This is something that museums are keen to highlight, particularly given the high cost of building new depot facilities.

With the recent openings in Rotterdam and London we are already seeing a trend towards more emphasis on the visitor experience. The Booijmans Depot in Rotterdam  charges visitors €20 to view an array of cases holding objects from collection. Visitors can also book a 30 minute guided tour to see objects up close, but there is no choice – you get to enter the section allocated by the museum.

Inside the Booijmans Depot

The V&A East Storehouse is different, because there is a lot more emphasis on visitor engagement. They are providing a “revolutionary Order an Object experience”, in which visitors can book in advance to see any object on-site up close, under supervision from “experienced handling staff”.  The visitor experience will also be enlivened with “a series of co-production projects, made in collaboration with communities and creatives from east London.” And there will be “New performances and artworks, oral histories and films highlight diverse voices and open up multiple meanings.”

This kind of bottom-up approach opens up the collection a lot more than the Rotterdam version. In that sense, maybe the claim to be “a new kind of museum experience” is justified, even compared with other ‘inside out’ museums. As one review says:

“This difference matters. The Depot still maintains clear boundaries between exhibition space and storage space, even when both are visible. The V&A East Storehouse dissolves those boundaries entirely. You’re not looking at storage – you’re in storage.”

But it is a lot more than fancy storage. Storehouse also has pop-up displays, creative workshops, performances and screenings, together with live encounters with conservators working with the objects. The inside-out museum turned upside-down.

The Art Newspaper described the aesthetic of the V&A depot as Pallets, not plinths and an experience “akin to a trip to Ikea”. They are also expecting it to be Ikea-busy: “"We’re preparing to be busy. We know how many slots there are; we assume all those slots will be taken over a period of time. I would imagine that we will sell out of 25,000 appointment slots over a 12-month period.” A drop in the ocean compared with the 3.5 million annual visits to the main museum.

IKEA. More or less objects than the V&A?

These expansions are costly, and are increasingly opening up debate about the need to grow museums collections. If, as the Guardian piece suggests, we need to collect ‘absolutely everything’, we will very soon run out space and money. The Booijmans Depot cost €94 million, for example. No wonder the Art Newspaper says it might be time for a ‘de-growth’ strategy. This might also work out quite nicely at a time when many European museums are hard up for cash and being asked to return treasures looted during colonial times. Some are slowly returning objects now, but a more radical return system would make museums in the developing world happy, and free up space for more objects in European capitals at a lower cost. But if this de-growth, devolution strategy really took off, then we would also be seeing a boom in new museum storage depots in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At least the architects will be happy.