How do you design a home to show a world -famous collection of global creativity? That was the challenge of the V&A, and Arup was there from the start and worked next to the museum team and the architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro, supported by Austin-Smith: Lord.
From an early concept to delivery, we have contributed to realizing the vision of the museum for a radically different, accessible and urgent visitor experience. This retrofitting of an existing building exposes the preservation and environmental output and enables a long -term climate tendency and at the same time protects the collection.
The result is V&A East Storehouse in Stratford, London, a reinterpretation of the museum storage, which turns tradition upside down. On average, less than 5% of the collection of a museum are exhibited. Here more than half a million creative works are brought to the public. Visitors are invited behind the scenes of a work museum to examine how and why objects are collected, preserved and interpreted in order to reveal powerful stories about global creativity and culture.
Subsequent room for a brand new museum experience
V&A East Storehouse over four levels and larger than 30 basketball spots shows a large selection of objects. The warehouse of the warehouse takes care of everything, from the tiny pens that a freep from the 17th century preserved for a 12-ton section of the facade from the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate. Designing a building that enables visitors to see such a wide variety of work and to get in touch with them required an meticulously detailed approach.
Our team for multidisciplinary engineering and designed managed the addition of new floors to exhibition areas, research rooms and nature conservation studios and at the same time minimized structural interventions. We have achieved this by carefully evaluating the capacity of the existing building and using this to direct general space planning. This enabled us to efficiently create more storage and accommodation levels, add new soils and strengthen existing ones.