Victoria & Albert Museum, a sprawling red brick pile in the middle of Kensington, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in London, to the tune of almost four million visitors per year. The museum, which holds millions of objects and archival documents, is a mecca for anyone who is interested in material culture—decorative arts, furniture, fabrics, jewelry, sculptures, pottery, photography, instruments—from all over the world, but with a great emphasis on the long and illustrious art history of the British Isles. However, no museum can display all of its riches at the same time, so V&A has come up with a great solution—a place that serves both as a museum storage facility and a public display, all the while bridging its Victorian-age past with the 21st-century multicultural art scene. Last spring, V&A opened the doors to an ultra-modern facility called V&A East Storehouse, which fuses the old model of a traditional display museum with the modern concept of participatory consumption of culture.

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