Diller Scofidio + Renfro directs film on storage for V&A exhibition at Venice biennale

London's Victoria and Albert museum and American studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro have collaborated on an exhibition on the architecture of storage at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, unveiled exclusively here.

Named On Storage, the exhibition was designed ahead of the opening of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's V&A East Storehouse on 31 May, which will function as the museum's storage space and visitor attraction.

Located in the Arsenale, On Storage features photos, drawings and models of the storehouse, as well as a film directed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro titled Boxed: The Mild Boredom of Order.

The film tracks the journey of a toothbrush as it moves between different scales of storage, from large-scale warehouses to travel bags in suitcases, aiming to bring to attention spaces that the V&A argued are rarely thought about.

"The design brief for almost all storage is: try to be as invisible as possible," V&A East Storehouse chief curator Brendan Cormier told Dezeen.

"For the most part, storage design has been incredibly successful in fulfilling this brief," he continued. "The detriment is that we forget it's there."

Cormier argued that not only is storage a key aspect of architectural design, but that all architecture is a form of storage.

"Implicit in the staging of the exhibition is to inspire architects and designers to think more deeply about their role in the global circulation and storage of things and how design intelligence can be applied directly to the problem of storage," he said.

"We want to think of architecture as high art and storage as lowly, utilitarian, pedestrian, but show me a piece of architecture that isn't storing something – bodies, stuff, carbon," Cormier added.

"Flip the question around, and you get a far more interesting conundrum – why is architecture an important storage consideration?"

The On Storage exhibition was motivated by lessons learned from working in the V&A East Storehouse, according to Cormier.

"We wanted to use the opportunity of the Venice Biennale to tease out some of the core tenets of the design of V&A East Storehouse, showing how the design problem that storage presents scales outwards to so many different forms of storage," he said.

"The key principle is that storage is only useful if it's accessible, something that our global logistics system has mastered, which is why we wanted to focus particularly on those spaces."

This year's Venice Architecture Biennale theme is Intelligens Natural Artificial Collective, curated by Italian architect Carlo Ratti. In an exclusive interview with Dezeen, Ratti said the core focus of the event is the climate crisis and people, and that "this certainly won't be the tech bro biennale".

As part of a day of exclusive online openings on Dezeen, we featured the German, Danish, British, Dutch and Nordic pavilions, among others.

The photography is courtesy of the V&A.

The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from 10 May and 23 November 2025. See Dezeen Events Guide for all the latest information you need to know to attend the event, as well as a list of other architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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