Museum Storage Is Becoming a Public Stage — and a Site of Debate
What happens when a museum’s back room is no longer hidden? A new anthology argues that the answer is more complicated than the language of transparency suggests. Keeping Culture: The Architecture of Storage, published by Valiz and edited by architecture scholars Susan Holden and Ashley Paine, examines the growing number of institutions that are turning storage into a public-facing experience.
The book arrives at a moment when museum collections have become so large that storage is no longer a marginal concern. By some estimates, as much as 95 percent of global museum holdings remain out of view. In response, institutions including The Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which opened in 2021, and V&A East Storehouse in London, which opened last year, have embraced “open storage” models that invite visitors into spaces once reserved for staff.
Keeping Culture treats those projects as more than architectural novelties. Across case studies from Japan to Flanders, the anthology asks how buildings shape the relationship between collections, museum workers, and the public. At V&A East, visitors move into the center of the structure, where crates and pallets are arranged almost as display elements, making the systems of care and circulation visible alongside the objects themselves.
Yet the contributors are wary of the idea that visibility is the same as access. The editors’ introduction questions the assumption that storage offers a neutral encounter, free from the museum’s interpretive authority. The book suggests that what is often described as disorder may feel more immediate, but not necessarily more truthful. Curatorial framing, it argues, is not a barrier to the object so much as a way of helping it speak.
That skepticism sharpens in Deyan Sudjic’s assessment of The Depot, which he calls “highly performative” and potentially manipulative. The concern is not only aesthetic. Museums are under increasing scrutiny for the scale of their collections, especially objects acquired through colonial violence, and open storage can look less like reform than a new way of presenting institutional wealth.
The anthology also confronts the most difficult forms of storage. In her essay, Carroll Go-Sam addresses the housing of Indigenous cultural materials and ancestral remains in Australia, where architecture is being asked to help reckon with historical harm. Elsewhere, Marina Otero Verzier writes about Tuvalu’s effort to become the first digital nation, a project that depends on remote data centers and the energy-intensive maintenance they require.
Taken together, the essays frame storage as a political and ethical problem as much as an architectural one. The book’s larger argument is clear: museums do not simply keep culture in reserve. They decide what can be seen, what must remain protected, and what kinds of access are possible without turning preservation into performance.
