Where did it all start? 

In 2013, Hawkins\Brown won the competition to reimagine the former Media Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It was an incredible opportunity to shape an Olympic legacy project. The vision for the project, now known as Here East, was to develop a campus for digital technologies, research, and enterprise, all brought together in the pursuit of innovation. It would be a place for startups wishing to scale, alongside businesses of scale wanting some startup magic.  

A year or so later, Kieran Long, the V&A’s Keeper of Design, Architecture, and Digital Collections, invited me to participate in a panel discussion at a V&A Late – a ‘Hackney Wick Takeover’ – to talk about our emerging ideas for Here East. Olympicopolis was still just a twinkle in Boris Johnson’s eye.  

The discussion was wide-ranging, our design references and influences pluralistic: Dazzle Ships and Gordon Matta Clark, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and MA1 Flight Jackets, Ant Farms, Aircraft Hangers and International Orange – the colour of space suits. Then, and this is where we unwittingly anticipated the future, we referenced ‘Wunderkammer’ or ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’. These became our touchstones for Hawkins\Brown’s response to the Gantry. Reminding me of those shelved cabinets, the Gantry would house those making and thinking about the future, instead of the arrangement of objects in those prototypical museums. 

In 2015, I was coaxed from practice, ostensibly ending a career as an architect and beginning one as a client, to become the V&A’s Director of Design, Exhibitions and Futureplan. Whilst leaving Hawkins\Brown and starting at the museum, numerous phone calls from then-director Martin Roth kept me up to date with the jury deliberations to select a team for the new cultural quarter on East Bank. Working closely with the winning team, O’Donnell Tuomey and Allies and Morrison, we developed designs for a single museum, V&A East, which was also to house the collection that was being held in Blythe House. 

The design was evolving incredibly well, but as a result of various planning challenges, the collection from Blythe House could no longer be accommodated in the slimmed down museum. A solution had to be found, but a tour of the country looking for suitable locations drew a blank, until I happened to mention that I needed to find 16,000 sqm for a new collection’s facility over a coffee with my former client, Gavin Poole CEO of Here East. The answer, spanning four floors within Here East, had been designated as a server farm but could now fittingly be replaced by a data centre of objects. 

Miraculously a location had been found, only a short walk from its sibling on East Bank. At the same time, a brief for a new collections, conservation and research centre was being rapidly developed by me, Bill Sherman, Catherine Ince, Clare McKeown and Lucy Dinnen, and many others, expertly led by V&A Deputy Director and COO Tim Reeve. 

We launched an international design competition to find a practice that would respond to the radical brief of allowing the visitor unprecedented access to the collection and an unmediated experience of museum practice. It was clear from her pitch that Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro would rise to the challenge. 

Returning to Hawkins\Brown shortly after DSR were appointed in May 2018, I’ve followed the journey of V&A East keenly and have kept in touch with many of my former colleagues. A project like that gets under your skin. 

Last year, I joined the Storehouse project team as a consultant Design Director to help shepherd the project to completion. Clearly much has happened in the interim and I can take no credit for its success or for the incredible hard work of so many that has made it happen, but to have had some small involvement fills me with pride.

Storehouse is radical because it situates the visitor at the centre of the whole museum experience – the collection a point cloud, a constellation of objects swirling around waiting to be discovered by the curious and inquisitive. After all, it is the public that makes museums. And when I visited today, the visitors were enthralled and captivated by its beautifully controlled mayhem!  

What object will you order?