London's V&A Warehouse Museum allows visitors to gain 5,000 years of creativity
London (AP) – Museums are like icebergs. Most of them are invisible.
Most large collections are only a small percentage of items, and the rest are locked in storage. But, not in the new V&A East warehouse, where the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened storage rooms for visitors to view and in many cases touching the items there.
The 16,000 square metre (170,000 square feet) building is larger than 30 basketball courts and has over 250,000 items, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering in its huge three-story collection hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but there is treasure at any time.
V&A is the British National Museum of Design, Performance and Applied Arts, a warehouse that surrounds the aisle behind open-air shelves, from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, modern furniture, Piaggio Scooter, Piaggio Scooter and Ably Paintinged Garbage can the Glastonbury Festival.
“It's 5,000 years of creativity,” said Kate Parsons, director of museum collection nursing and acquisition. It took more than a year and 379 trucks to move objects from the museum's former storage facility in western London to a new location.
Approaching the object
In the museum’s biggest innovation, anyone can have a one-on-one date with any object, from the Vivienne Westwood Mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese network statue. Most items can even be handled, in addition to hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpapers containing arsenic.
Parsons ordered an order for the subject service “with the very personal, close interaction with the series behind the scenes,” Parsons said, showing off one of the most requested items to date: the 1954 pink silk Tafta Tafta Baliciaga evening gown in 1954. Near one of the study rooms is a military top designed by Bob Mackie, which was made by Elton John at a 1981 world tour and two silk kimono ready visits.
Parsons said the public has had a “stunning reaction” since the building opened in late May. Visitors range from students seeking inspiration for weddings and “people who used equipment to measure the thread of the 1850 dress last week.” She said strangers who come to view different objects often have conversations.
“It’s so good,” Parsons said. “You never know…we have this completely new concept, and of course we hope and believe we will do the audience research, we think people will come. But until they actually do it and go through the door, we don't know.”
A new cultural area
Founded in the 1850s, the V&A flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district is one of the largest tourist attractions in the UK. The warehouse is located in the town of Olympic Park, the Post-Industrial Avenue in East London, hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics.
As part of the post-Olympic Regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes the Academy of Arts and Fashion, the Dance Theatre and another V&A branch, which will open next year. The warehouse employs dozens of young people recruited from surrounding areas, including some of London's most deprived areas.
The building was designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the company behind New York's High Line Park, and the building's space can display objects so large that it has been frequently displayed before, including India's 17th-century Mughal colonnade, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a stage that was on the way up to Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Pablo Pablo, a high-high competition over the 30 Footsteps (30) competition (30 competitions).
Also on a huge scale, most of the disappearing buildings, including the gilded 15th-century ceiling of Torrijos Palace in Spain, and the concrete facade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London house.
This is not a quiet art temple, it is a working facility. Encourage conversations and beep in the background. Workers are completing David Bowie Center, home of costumes, instruments, letters, lyrics, lyrics and photos of late London musicians, the archive will be open in the warehouse in September.
Museums seek transparency
One purpose of the warehouse is to expose the inner workings of the museum through displays, thereby delving into all aspects of the work of conservators – from the eternal struggle with insects to the numbering system of museum content and the viewing gallery of viewing staff.
As museums in the UK have increasingly reviewed the origins of their collections, openness has increased. They face pressure to return to objects that were sometimes acquired under disputed circumstances during the British Empire era
Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said V&A is adopting a transparency policy, “so that we can talk openly about where things come from, how they end up in the V&A collection and make sure that researchers and locals, as well as locals from around the world and people from all over the world have free access to these objects.
“On average, there are one to five percent of the museum’s collection,” she said. “What we’re doing here is, ‘No, the whole collection belongs to all of us. It’s a national collection and you should have access to it.” That’s our basic principle. ”
