No more red ropes: At this museum you can actually touch all the art

Imagine mixing an IKEA with a museum and you can get an idea of what the experience at the V&A East Storehouse in London will be like when it opens on 31 May. The new exhibition and research center will feature four floors containing over 250,000 eclectic objects from Roman frescos to avant-garde fashion and pretty much everything in between.

The project, which has been ten years in the making, will give visitors access to items that are normally stowed away in a museum basement or warehouse, or if on display can only be appreciated from a distance. They will be able to get up close and personal with these priceless objects.

“We want visitors to learn what a collection is, how we store it… How colleagues work across the museum, from conservators to the technical service team,” explained the V&A East Storehouse’s senior curator Georgina Haseldine to CNN. “This is real back-of-house museum work,” she added.

V&A Storehouse East: A museum where you can actually touch all the art

The V&A East Storehouse is located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in northeast London. The “working museum” is a museum-grade storage facility that has been turned into an exhibition and research space. The public has access to three of its four floors, all of which are filled with metal shelves, the kind that you’d find in a warehouse, stacked with objects.

Within the V&A you’ll find encounter an eccentric collection including “suits of armors, stage cloths, biscuit tins, building fragments, puppets, thimbles, chandeliers, [and] motorcycles,” said Elizabeth Diller, co-founding partner Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio that designed the exhibition space. Some of these works haven’t seen the light of day in decades.

While you cannot just go around picking things up off the shelves, surprisingly if you actually want to touch one of the items, you can. However, you’ll have to book an appointment with the V&A East Storehouse’s Research Center at the facility.

“These collections belong to the public,” said Kate Parsons, director of conservation. “And it’s just incredible that we can enable access.”

The process is simple, just log on and find an available slot to book, the portal has been up and running since 13 May. Conservationists and investigators will be able to teach members of the public how to properly handle the objects that are part of a museum’s exhibition that would normally off limits.

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