La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London have opened a special project for the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025, titled On Storage. Curated by Brendan Cormier, Chief Curator of V&A East, in collaboration with architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the exhibition delves into the global architecture of storage, the often-invisible infrastructure that shapes how we move, organize, and live with objects.
Staged in the Sale d’Armi A at the Arsenale and running from May 10 to November 23, 2025, On Storage is anchored by a newly commissioned six-channel film installation titled Boxed: The Mild Boredom of Order, directed by DS+R. The film offers a poetic journey through the life of a seemingly mundane object, a toothbrush, as it passes through different types of storage spaces, from vast warehouses to personal suitcases. The toothbrush becomes a lens through which the viewer explores the intricate, often overlooked systems that structure our material world.
This film was created in anticipation of the opening of the V&A East Storehouse on May 31, 2025, a groundbreaking new public storage facility and attraction in East London. Designed by DS+R and located in the repurposed Media and Broadcast Centre from the London 2012 Olympics, the Storehouse provides unprecedented public access to over half a million items in the V&A’s collection, including 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books, and nearly 1,000 archives. It is a radical gesture toward transparency, eliminating traditional display barriers and allowing visitors to move freely through four levels of stored cultural history.
At the Venice pavilion, the exhibition also includes large-scale photographs of the Storehouse, DS+R’s original architectural models and sketchbooks, and behind-the-scenes photography captured by emerging East London-based photographers. Together, these materials form a meditation on storage as both a logistical necessity and a cultural act.
The Venice exhibition foregrounds the physical and emotional dimensions of storing, transporting, and interacting with objects. From the behind-the-scenes labor of warehouse workers to the private ritual of packing a suitcase, On Storage renders visible the usually hidden architecture of modern life.
Storage is everywhere, yet it rarely registers in our everyday consciousness. Most storage spaces are behind closed doors, inaccessible to the public, or not conventionally classified as such. On Storage presents a view of the world as a massively interwoven and complex series of storage architectures, designed to accommodate an ever-increasing quantity of stuff produced.
The project also signals a broader ambition: to highlight the V&A East’s mission as a new cultural anchor in East London. Slated to open fully in 2026 with the addition of the V&A East Museum, the campus is committed to accessibility, creative experimentation, and celebrating making in all its forms.
Inside the Storehouse’s Weston Collections Hall, a three-story atrium, visitors will eventually encounter six monumental architectural artifacts, many unseen for decades due to their scale. Highlights include the only complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior outside the United States, a 15th-century Spanish palace ceiling, and a rare full-scale Frankfurt Kitchen. These icons of design and architecture now reside not in isolation, but embedded within the narrative of stored history.
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