FENIX Rotterdam: When a Warehouse Becomes a Place of Arrival

A museum can change our understanding of a chair simply by changing the distance at which we encounter it. Across a gallery, it becomes a silhouette; closer up, its joints, wear and proportions begin to explain how it was made. V&A East Storehouse in London builds an entire visitor experience around that shift in attention. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with Austin-Smith:Lord as executive architect, it places public routes within a working collection store. The architectural story begins with a practical question: what happens when the spaces that care for objects also become places where people learn to look? ( Austin-Smith:Lord )

Why V&A East Storehouse matters in 2026

Opened on 31 May 2025, the Storehouse has continued to attract design attention beyond its first season. Wallpaper* named it Launch of the Year in its 2026 Design Awards, while Fieldwork Facility’s work for the project received Best of Show at the Brand Impact Awards announced in September 2026. The Brand Impact recognition concerns its wayfinding and interpretation scheme, giving particular attention to how visitors find their way through the interior. Together, these responses draw attention to the relationship between space and information. An ambitious interior becomes more useful when visitors can understand how to explore it and feel entitled to do so. ( Wallpaper* ; Creative Bloq )

A second life for an Olympic building

The Storehouse occupies part of Here East, within the former London 2012 Olympic Media and Broadcast Centre in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Its conversion creates a different kind of architectural opportunity from a museum conceived around a new façade. The existing enclosure establishes the working conditions; the design gives it another public purpose. Across approximately 16,000 square metres and four levels, storage, study, conservation and visitor access have to coexist. Distinct from the separate V&A East Museum, the Storehouse brings public access into the infrastructure of collecting. Its character comes from the meeting of a large existing enclosure with the closely considered spaces and systems needed to care for its contents. ( ArchDaily )

Arup’s account of the project describes how the team assessed the existing structure’s capacity before deciding where to add floors and where strengthening was required. That work gives adaptive reuse a concrete meaning here. It involves working with load, height and the demands of a collection whose contents vary enormously in size and material. The resulting interior depends on decisions that are rarely prominent in a finished photograph. Reuse can preserve an enclosure, but a successful conversion also has to make its new occupation possible. In this case, that occupation includes the patient, highly specialised work of keeping objects available for future generations. ( Arup )

The collections hall changes the centre of gravity

The principal spatial move places the publicly accessible Weston Collections Hall at the centre, surrounded by progressively more restricted areas. Visitors move towards the heart of the storage arrangement, rather than following galleries laid out along its edge. Walkways and transparent floor panels make it possible to look across levels, giving the interior a depth that a sequence of separate rooms would not offer. The route becomes a way of understanding the collection’s scale. It also changes the relationship between movement and attention: a glance across the hall may suggest where to go next, while a nearer object can interrupt that intention and hold someone in place. ( Wallpaper* ; ArchDaily )

This freedom is supported by a recognisable architectural framework. Steel racking, platforms and open storage arrangements provide a repeated order against which very different objects can be read. The materials carry the practical character of a working store, while the large central volume gives that order a public presence. That balance is familiar to interior designers working with collections, displays or an eclectic mix of furniture: a clear spatial order can accommodate objects that differ in period, scale and finish. At the Storehouse, repetition provides an organising structure without requiring the collection itself to become visually uniform. The objects retain their differences, and those differences give the space much of its energy. ( Arquitectura Viva )

When a ceiling becomes something to study

Among the Storehouse’s large architectural objects is the painted and gilded timber ceiling from the lost Torrijos Palace near Toledo, made around 1490. Its presence introduces a different scale of looking from that required by a chair or a small decorative object. Pattern, geometry and construction become parts of a room-sized composition. Seen within a contemporary storage environment, the ceiling also makes the distinction between an architectural fragment and an intact building unusually apparent. It survives as something that can be studied closely, while its original setting has been lost. Its beauty invites attention, but its displacement remains part of its meaning. ( V&A )

The collection also includes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kaufmann Office, designed for Edgar J. Kaufmann in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. For architects and interior designers, such an ensemble offers a chance to consider furniture and enclosure together, rather than treating an isolated chair or desk as the whole design. An interior establishes relationships between surfaces, objects and the body; separating those elements can make that thinking harder to recognise. Bringing a room into a museum preserves some relationships while changing others. It becomes a resource for looking carefully, with the important qualification that an interior encountered in a collection is experienced differently from one still in everyday use. ( Abitare )

Orientation is part of the interior design

A dense collection can be generous and difficult to navigate at the same time. Fieldwork Facility’s wayfinding and interpretation address that tension through coordinated colour, typography and information, giving visitors tools to establish their own routes. The studio describes its approach through the idea of an operating system: a framework for searching and making connections. Its contribution belongs within the architectural discussion because signs influence where someone turns, pauses or feels able to enter. For a hotel, showroom or cultural venue, the parallel is practical. A memorable room still needs to communicate what is available and how people can use it. ( Fieldwork Facility )

The Storehouse’s Order an Object service extends access beyond what can be seen along the public route, allowing visitors to book close study of selected collection items. This is an important distinction from the idea that everything in storage is immediately on open display. Access is organised through staff, appointments and the care requirements of individual objects. The service makes the building useful as a resource for research and creative practice as well as a place to visit. For a designer investigating a material or construction detail, the difference between seeing an object at a distance and studying it with assistance can change the questions that become possible. ( V&A )

The care behind the apparent openness

An open visual experience depends on carefully managed environmental conditions. Arup describes humidity monitoring, adaptable lighting and acoustic measures designed around the needs of both collections and people. Those systems complicate any assumption that an industrial appearance means a technically simple interior. Paper, wood, textiles and other materials require protection; visitors and staff also need spaces that remain comfortable and workable. The architectural achievement lies partly in accommodating those demands within a shared setting. What appears open and immediate is supported by a network of controls, specialist knowledge and operational decisions that allows the encounter to take place. ( Arup )

Eva Steidl’s review in Stylepark raises a useful reservation: the freedom to make individual connections can also leave visitors wanting more guidance. That observation does not cancel the value of self-directed discovery. It identifies a design responsibility that continues after the central hall has been formed and the objects installed. Choice is most useful when a visitor has enough orientation to exercise it. The Storehouse makes that balance particularly visible, inviting us to assess openness through the experience it supports. The question is whether different visitors can find a way into the collection, including those arriving without specialist knowledge or a particular object in mind. ( Stylepark )

The lasting interest of V&A East Storehouse lies in how it makes sustained attention possible. Its architecture brings people into a working environment where a ceiling, a piece of furniture or a modest everyday object can become the beginning of a new line of thought. For the design community, that is a valuable form of generosity. A space does not always need to provide the final interpretation; it can give someone the time, proximity and support to develop one. The most rewarding discovery may be an object that was never the reason for coming, but becomes the reason to return.