As Venice Biennale opens today, Pavilion of Applied Arts brings the concept of storage to the forefront ahead of V&A Storehouse opening in London.
Our correspondent at the Biennale, Marta Bogna-Drew, talks to Brendan Cormier in Venice
One of the most anticipated projects at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia and the V&A present ‘On Storage’ — a special project for the Applied Arts Pavilion.
Curated by Brendan Cormier, Chief Curator of V&A East, in collaboration with the acclaimed architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the exhibition explores the often-overlooked architecture of storage — the global systems, infrastructures, and spaces that quietly shape how objects circulate through the world.
At its heart is ‘Boxed: The Mild Boredom of Order,’ a newly commissioned six-channel film installation by DS+R. Following the journey of a humble toothbrush through a series of storage spaces – from vast distribution centres to tightly packed luggage and medicine cabinets – the film reflects on the hidden rhythms and logics of contemporary life.
This new commission arrives ahead of the much-anticipated opening of V&A East Storehouse in London’s East Bank – the new museum quarter at the heart of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – at the end of May. Designed by DS+R and opening to the public on 31st May 2025, the Storehouse is a groundbreaking new kind of cultural space: part working collection storage, part visitor experience, and home to over half a million objects spanning every creative discipline.
The exhibition in Venice also includes large-scale photographs of the Storehouse, DS+R’s original architectural model and sketchbook, and behind-the-scenes images captured by emerging photographers from East London — offering visitors a richly textured introduction to the V&A’s bold new chapter.
We met curator Brendan Cormier in Venice to discuss the ideas behind the pavilion and the vision for V&A East Storehouse.
In the lead up to V&A East Storehouse opening, what are you most looking forward to the public experiencing in the Applied Arts Pavilion in Venice?
We’re opening the V&A Storehouse in three weeks’ time. For the past ten years, we’ve had the opportunity to curate an exhibition at the Pavilion of Applied Arts at the Biennale. Looking at the calendar, we realised this was the perfect moment to highlight the affinities between the Biennale’s theme – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, set by curator Carlo Ratti – and to make a subtle reference to the V&A Storehouse, without turning it into a literal narrative.
What I find so compelling about Carlo Ratti’s curatorial theme is the idea of diffuse forms of intelligences that exist in the world — and the museum and its collections are one of them. You can look at a museum’s collections as a very large, aggregated collections of embedded forms of knowledge and intelligence across the space. That’s what makes the Intelligens theme feel so relevant.
There was already this natural connection to the theme, but at the same time, if you look at what the museum fundamentally provides, you begin to realise: storage is an architectural problem. That was, quite literally, the brief we gave to Diller Scofidio + Renfro — “We’ve got all this stuff. Can you design something that not only stores it but makes it accessible?”
Then you look at the collection itself and realise that it contains hundreds of thousands of examples of storage design solutions. What is a vase? What is a cup? What is a snuff box? I haven’t run the numbers, but a large proportion of our collection is, in essence, storage — objects designed to hold, contain, and preserve.
So you have storage as a design problem represented by the objects, and storage as a design problem represented by the building. And the more we thought about it, the more we realised: storage as a concept rules our lives in every single way.
You can use the storage metaphor to describe a house, the Earth’s crust, even the human body. We wanted to blow up this idea — to show that although storage is meant to be hidden, it can’t be entirely out of the way. In fact, I find it quite funny that, for most of the 20th century, the prevailing principle in storage design was invisibility. And we achieved it — through sleek design or by hiding things geographically. But the result is that we’ve lost our sense of what storage actually is and why it matters.
So we wanted to visualise that – to reintroduce the idea of storage across multiple scales, and show how our everyday lives are shaped by finely tuned systems designed both to store and to provide access to objects. That led us to logistics – which plays a crucial role – and we started asking: is a distribution centre storage? Well, temporarily, yes. Is a toothbrush connected with storage? Absolutely — it’s in temporary storage at nearly every stage of its life.
For me, what’s really interesting is that storage and access are two sides of the same coin. And that’s a perfect metaphor for Storehouse.
There’s only one example I can think of where you’d design something for storage without ever wanting to access it again – and that’s toxic waste. There’s been a lot of thinking about how to prevent future access to that. But everything else? If it’s designed only to be stored, it’s the classic problem: you put it in a closet and forget about it.
The ideal design for storage allows you to both put something away and access it quickly. Logistics is the perfect expression of that — a fluid system of temporary storage.
That was the impetus behind the film Liz [Diller] and her team directed. It follows the life of a single toothbrush — from factory to port, to distribution centre, to home, to medicine cabinet, to luggage, to airport, to hotel, to trash, to recycling centre. All the different scales and spaces a humble everyday object moves through in our logistics-driven lives.
It’s a 25-minute film – a meditation on these spaces – and it tries to draw that connection between access and storage, and the invisible systems that move objects through the world.
Is the V&A East Storehouse going to host all of the V&A archives? Or have you retained storage facilities elsewhere, too?
We have a lot of storage on site at South Kensington. And numbers are quite deceptive: if I told you we have something like 4 million objects on site at the V&A, you might be shocked, but that’s because we largely store our flat ones on site — our entire photography collection, our poster collection, our designs collection. That is all stored in cold storage, on site, and it’s accessible via our Prints and Drawings Study Room.
And then we have a few other smaller collections — for example, our Asia collection is at South Kensington. We store some of our metalwork collection. We have the top floor of the V&A — it has that lovely open visible storage — so a large amount of our ceramics collection is just there and made visible. And that’s actually also really a precedent for thinking about Storehouse, and gave the idea of taking it one step further.
So largely Storehouse is the combination of a move of our objects from a pre-existing site, which was Blythe House in Olympia. And that consists of our furniture collection, our fashion collection, but also a large number of objects from our paintings collection, a large number of spillover objects from the Asia collection. Some of the larger ceramics that didn’t have any space to be shown in that open or visible storage floor at the V&A. So it’s a representation of that move from our pre-existing storage facility in West London to its new home.
Why choose to showcase a film about the storage life of a toothbrush at the Venice Biennale? Do you have any famous toothbrushes in the V&A East Storehouse collection?
Yes, we do! One or two. And they’ve come into the collection in different ways — some of them you might look at and wonder whether they’re actually toothbrushes, or just very old objects, and significant for that reason.
But the decision to show the life of a toothbrush at the Venice Biennale was really because it’s the most innocuous, everyday object you can think of. It’s something you might readily throw out at the end of a trip. It felt useful for the script to bring you from a factory in China to a holiday suitcase. And everyone who is here, and who will visit the Pavilion, will have a toothbrush.
Storage is a forgotten and under the radar piece of functional architecture that often surfaces in everyday life only when it’s malfunctioning. How would you like the general public to approach the V&A East Storehouse when it opens its doors?
I think there will be a lot of doubt at the beginning. We’re opening this place seven days a week, making it completely publicly accessible. So, in a weird way, I’m hoping people will be astonished – first doubtful, and then astonished – that they can actually access it and have such a close relationship with these objects.
But I also hope – and we’ve put a lot of work into the design – that it peels back the curtain slightly on what a functioning, working museum is, and the amount of labour that goes into something like storage. Storage is always seen as passive. But for those who’ve worked in museums, there’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into maintaining things in a still state.
The design of the building itself allows you to see into conservation studios, to see technicians packing and preparing objects for movement. It won’t be as extreme as a contemporary distribution centre, but you’ll get the sense that these objects are in circulation – that they’re either heading into conservation, or being prepared for a new show and will be on display.
I’d like people to understand that museum collections aren’t static – they’re dynamic spaces – and that Storehouse is a representation of that.
Is it time to reconsider the role of storage not only in everyday life, but also as an essential component of preserving culture, heritage and museology?
Yes, yes, and no. Preservation is what we mostly associate with storage. But the other side of the coin is circulation, because our job as curators is not just preservation, but also dissemination.
The preservation part is, in one sense, the easy part. There’s always a risk when you want to display things, but our role as curators is to showcase these items and make them accessible. And we’re failing if we don’t do that.
Maybe it’s about rethinking the brief of what storage is and creating a stronger plan for access and circulation. This should be integrated into the design of all storage systems, both for the prosaic and for museum objects.
Is the idea of opening up storages or depots marking a new era for museums?
Yes, It’s a huge trend, it’s a wave! I’m not a trendologist, so I haven’t quite figured out what is behind that. But there are some forces of play. One of them is that all these museums have digitised their collections. And so through digitalisation, it’s become a apparent how much of the collection is not on display; but also digitisation works a bit of a teaser. It’s like, ooh, I really would like to see that. So, is there an architectural kind of equivalent to digitised databases?
Secondly, with everything becoming more and more digital, the hunger for the tactile is very much there, the hunger to see the real thing.
And then thirdly, there’s a political angle involved: taxpayer value. I hate that term taxpayer, but, we like to say, “This is a national collection, all of this is for you”. There’s increasing pressure on museums to live up to that promise.
So I think digitalisation has created so much online access, but it begs the question of how much access can we have of the real collection. And you’re starting to see these architectural solutions going to the forefront of addressing this demand.
Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project at the Biennale Architettura 2025. La Biennale di Venezia and the V&A London present: On Storage, curated by Brendan Cormier Sale d’Armi, Arsenale 10th May –23rd November 2025
