There are some architecture critics who like to pretend that they operate inside a vacuum, a hermetically sealed chamber, of their own creation. They make a point of not reading—let alone quoting!—reviews of projects that they themselves are writing about, in an effort I suppose not to expose their judgments to any risk of contagion. Many critics I respect deeply, friends of mine, prefer to work this way. But I’ve never seen the point of such restraint.

This isn’t to say that I have any reservations about being the first, as it were, to race down the dock and jump into the lake. I’m always happy for the chance to write about a project that hasn’t yet been reviewed, as I did when I launched Punch List in June with a post on Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, or when last week I was the first critic to wrestle—inside the world’s tiniest ring—with Michael Meredith’s new book, “Smaller Architecture.” But when other critics get to a building before I do, I appreciate the opportunity to compare their thinking with mine. And I do my best to acknowledge the takes that have shaped my point of view, as I’ll try to do here. In the end I think it helps me as much as my readers to explain where the critical consensus about a given project lies.

Or how that consensus has shifted, as the case may be. Take for example the subject of this week’s dispatch, the newish V&A East Storehouse by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (in collaboration with Austin-Smith:Lord) in East Bank, a cultural district taking shape inside the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, eight miles or so northeast of the Victoria and Albert mothership in South Kensington.

The V&A has transformed the media center for the 2012 London Olympics into an experiment in open shelving, what the architects call a “cabinet of curiosities” for the 21st century. (This comes ahead of the debut of a proper V&A satellite nearby, a ground-up museum building by Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey expected to open in the first half of 2026.) To a large extent the Storehouse opportunity was imposed on the museum when the British government announced plans a decade ago to sell the building, Blythe House, where the V&A (along with the Science Museum and British Museum) had long stored its archives.

The V&A responded to that news by organizing a 2018 architectural competition to reimagine the media center’s interior. The big idea was pull a chunk of the museum’s archive out of storage, put it on public and rather democratic display, and give members of the public the chance not only to see works of art in a new way but also to handle them directly, as one might a rare book in a university library, by putting in an advance request, in what the museum calls “the Order an Object Experience.” In the first few weeks of this system’s operation, the museum reported, the single most requested item was “a 1954 pink silk taffeta evening dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga.”

The DS+R team—led on this project by the firm’s partners as well as David Allin, who joined the office in 2006—has in essence produced a gigantic windowless glowing vitrine, a rectangle of space with objects on shelves and a series of open walkways around the perimeter and a sort of plaza in the center, all of it pulsing beneath a ceiling of LED panels bright enough to illuminate a surgical theater. The look is glossy warehouse, catwalk chic, and perfectly rendered for social media. You walk on open metal grating that clangs beneath your feet. (“The metal grid flooring is not suitable for stilettos or kitten heels,” the museum warns.) The shelved objects, often sitting on simple wood pallets, or held in place with strips of Styrofoam, are pushed forward, as if daring you to touch them. These include, among many other categories, paintings, sculpture, furniture, dresses, swords, and sizable architectural fragments including a wood-paneled 1937 office interior by Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar Kaufmann and a slice of the façade of London’s 1972 Robin Hood Gardens, the social housing estate designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and demolished in phases beginning in 2017. The floor of the gathering space in the center is replaced in large sections with glass, allowing you to look down and see yet more objects, another teeming world, below.

Storehouse opened at the end of May, accompanied by a clutch of very positive notices from art and architecture critics alike. In the RIBA Journal, John Jervis wrote, “The architecture is deliberately anonymous, and the effect is mesmerising.” For the Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright, Storehouse “provides a thrilling window into the sprawling stacks of our national museum of everything.” (In a line that only a Brit could dream up, he noted that one virtue of the design’s openness is that it thrusts visitors into “the heady coalface of conservation.” The heady coalface!) His colleague, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, declared, “This is what the museum of the future looks like,” awarding the project five out of five stars.

I visited Storehouse in the middle of July and also found it a revelation. It is easily the most assured and accomplished new project I’ve seen this year. What I remember most about that visit, in the company of the wryly restrained Brendan Cormier, chief curator at V&A East, is the reaction of visitors, who have been pouring into Storehouse since it opened, following an entry sequence that takes them through a rather generic lobby, with a café tucked to one side, and then up some stairs and through a kind of airlock before depositing them onto a narrow bridge, lined on both sides with busts, paintings, and other objects, and offering the first glimpse of the thrumming hangar ahead. I heard two people audibly gasp as they took in that view. I can assure you this doesn’t happen often in new buildings I visit. Cathedrals, maybe, but not remade media centers.

DS+R, and Liz Diller in particular, have been chasing the idea of an open-archive museum for many years. For the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, whose progress I tracked closely as L.A. Times architecture critic, the firm won a small invited competition with a concept it called “the veil and the vault.” Early versions of the design suggested opening up the middle section of the building, the so-called vault, holding the museum’s archive, to dramatic public view, though in the end there is just a “patch of glass” along the stairs that lead down from the top-floor galleries to the first-floor lobby.

In recent weeks, back from my trip to London, and as I considered writing about Storehouse, I came across an essay for ArtReview by Dan Hicks about the project, beneath the headline “What Isn’t at the V&A Storehouse.” (To be more specific, in the spirit of citing our sources, I came across an Aug. 15 Bluesky post about the essay by the writer and scholar Shannon Mattern, late of Penn, who herself is always generous about credit and influence.) Hicks, a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, writes that DS+R has “recreated a classic colonial-era museum: two mezzanine galleries above a main court, an uncanny simulacrum of Edinburgh’s Industrial Museum of Scotland (renamed the Royal Scottish Museum, now part of National Museum of Scotland) or Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (where I am a curator) rendered in walkways made of steel grating, glass railings and adjustable pallet racking. The suggestion of a glass roof is even conjured by huge LED panels on the ceiling of this windowless chronotope.”

He continues: “The idea involves trying gently to ease nineteenth- or early twentieth-century colonial-militarist displays of trade, commerce and expeditions back in time, as if they were part of a much older regime of display—the early modern bric-a-brac aesthetic of the wunderkammer.”

He’s right about the visual and architectural similarities between Storehouse and Pitt Rivers; there can be no doubt about that. His biggest complaint, given the colonial roots of much of the V&A collection, is the rather minimalist approach to labels and wall text: “At Storehouse, you can see at least a thousand unlabelled items sitting on the shelves. There’s no way of finding out what they are. The decision to have no information about the objects is incomprehensible.” The provenance of many objects, including those Hicks calls “stolen goods,” remains a mystery.

This oversight is all the more galling, he argues, considering that the museum’s larger effort to digitize its full collection, across all its venues and satellites, is lagging. “A conservative estimate,” Hicks writes, “might suggest there are 2.1 million objects in the V&A collections (plus the library and archives), with some 800,000 missing from the database.” He adds, “There is transparency and there is the performance of transparency. Storehouses and halls of mirrors.”

I had a chance to talk with Liz Diller this week about these criticisms. (Though a few are overcooked, I find many of them persuasive.) To her credit, she was willing to confront them directly.

“I do agree that there’s an issue to struggle with here,” she told me, “and that there’s an obligation on the part of the institution to reveal the provenance of things if they can track it and trace it.” She added, “Obviously looted artifacts should be returned. And there should be some kind of public discussion about how that process unfolds.”

At the same time, she conceded that the paucity of labels throughout Storehouse was as much an architectural decision as a curatorial one: “I don't like the idea of wall labels, in the traditional sense. We were thinking about how when you go ‘backstage’ at a museum, or into the archive, there’s usually a tag, and the tag has some kind of basic coded information on it. If there was a way of keeping it a little bit less like the museum is talking to you, in a one-way process, but, instead, it gives a little and you give a little, in a back and forth, that probably would be the right balance.”

Her most optimistic take on the Storehouse project (perhaps simply because this is how most architects see the world, and their place in it) is that the transparency and access opened up by the architecture may help accelerate the V&A’s efforts to achieve similar goals in the rest of its work, starting with its own database, and perhaps extending to the larger question of its colonial baggage. She said that something similar happened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where DS+R’s expansion and re-imagination of the galleries opened in 2019.

“By making more space for the collection,” Diller said, the MoMA curators “themselves realized what was missing from the collection—what was overlooked—and the need to try to make up for it.”

I think Hicks is right that the lack of labels and shortage of scannable QR codes are significant problems that the museum should be at pains to address; in combination, they leave visitors wandering through a visually diverting space in a faintly numbed state of ignorance, their curiosity about issues like provenance and colonialism, to the extent that they have carried these into the building with them, somewhat dulled by the power of the architecture. (This was very much my experience.) At the same time, it would be too cynical by half to suggest that Storehouse is in and of itself, or by intention, a diversionary tactic, the product of a conscious strategy to use a simulacrum of openness to distract the public from the V&A’s unwillingness to confront its colonial legacy in a broader institutional sense.

Storehouse, on balance, is for me a thrilling architectural package the unwrapping of which suggests the pressing need for more unwrapping still (in ways literal, digital, and otherwise). I think of essays like Hicks’s as an integral part of that larger hoped-for unveiling, rather than something Storehouse seeks in any active way to foreclose, or even drown out by sheer force of booming architectural pyrotechnics. There are blind spots in the project, to be sure, in both pedagogical and design terms, but that is something quite distinct from architectural sleight of hand. 

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I wrote the fall architecture preview for the New York Times again this year. It’s online now and will appear in print on Sept. 14. The overarching theme is the logjam of museum openings between now and next summer—a development that dissonantly enough emerges just as the very idea of the museum in the U.S., at least in its most idealistic and perhaps outdated Enlightenment form, is cracking under a crude but persistent ideological pressure campaign from Washington. V&A East Storehouse makes a cameo.

You can catch me ranting about criticism and related topics, in the company of my New York Review of Architecture editor Samuel Medina and other distinguished panelists, at Chicago’s Graham Foundation on the afternoon Sept. 20. It’s part of the opening weekend of the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, with artistic direction this time around by Florencia Rodriguez, a friend and fellow critic and one of the collaborators on our Speakers’ Corner project in Venice. You can register here free of charge. A reception follows. Come say hi.

Kate Wagner wrote an essay for the Nation, with her usual smarts, about the White House ballroom proposal, the subject of a Punch List post in early August.

Meanwhile the Trump administration last week issued another executive order mandating classical architecture as national style. Please make it stop.

See you next week!

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