Featuring Architect Elizabeth Diller and curators Brendan Cormier and Catherine Ince

Coinciding with Design Across Time—Cooper Hewitt’s current exhibition showcasing just 125 works from its collection of 215,000+ objects—join us for an inside look at the recently opened V&A East Storehouse. In this edition of Making the Museum, hear from architect Elizabeth Diller and curators Brendan Cormier and Catherine Ince, the team behind the V&A East Storehouse, in conversation with Cooper Hewitt’s Director Maria Nicanor.

Founded in 1852, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) now has over 2.5 million objects located across six sites in England. The V&A East Storehouse in London is one of the latest and most ambitious in which the public is invited into the museum’s collection archive and storage. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the building is home to 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives from the V&A’s collection of fashion, textiles, furniture, theater and performance, metalwork, ceramics, glass, sculpture, architecture, paintings, and product design.

More about the series:
Making the Museum is a new public program series convening design leaders working with museums and collections from around the world as they share an inside look at redefining cultural institutions through design strategies. The series explores how design plays a role in the ways in which these organizations are adapting to shifting social, architectural, environmental, and technological contexts while still ensuring public access to these vast and intricate collections that tell the stories of our lives.

SPEAKERS 

Brendan Cormier is the Chief Curator of V&A East, comprising both Storehouse and V&A East Museum, two new sites on the Olympic Park in London. Over the last 11 years at the V&A he has curated several projects, including the V&A Gallery at Design Society in Shenzhen, A World of Fragile Parts (2016) and On Storage (2025) for the Venice Architecture Biennale, Cars: Accelerating the Modern World (2019) at V&A South Kensington, and Photo City: How Image Shaped the Urban World (2024) for V&A Dundee.

Elizabeth Diller is the Co-Founding Partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a New York-based design studio founded in 1981 whose practice spans architecture, installation art, multi-media performance, and print. DS+R’s work addresses the evolving role of institutions and the future of cities, and Diller has led many cultural projects that have reshaped New York, including The Shed, the High Line, the expansion and renovation of MoMA, and the renovation and redesign of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She also co-created, co-directed, and co-produced The Mile-Long Opera, an immersive choral performance staged on the High Line. Most recently, she completed the Al-Mujadilah Center & Mosque for Women in Doha, the first purpose-built women’s mosque in the Muslim world; the V&A East Storehouse in London, a new kind of museum that exposes working collections to the public through visible storage and conservation spaces; and the adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse in Cambridge as the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning.

Catherine Ince is an independent curator, writer, and consultant based in London. She has worked in museums, galleries, and public sector arts organizations in the UK and abroad for over 25 years. Ince is currently a Research Fellow of the newly established Charles and Ray Eames Foundation. Between 2015 and 2023 she was the inaugural Chief Curator of V&A East, for which she developed the curatorial vision, program, and grassroots audience engagement projects for the V&A’s two-site project in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park London. The V&A East Storehouse opened in May 2025, and the V&A East Museum in spring 2026. Ince is also known for her critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications on major figures and movements of the twentieth century, including large-scale surveys of Charles and Ray Eames and the Eames Office, the Bauhaus art school, and avant-garde Japanese fashion. She has written for magazines, journals, and books on leading figures in art and design history, and the intersection of art, design, and architecture.

Maria Nicanor (moderator) is an architecture and design curator and historian. She is passionate about public access to culture and rethinking the traditional roles of museums by experimenting with new storytelling formats that connect cultural institutions with civic life. Before joining Cooper Hewitt as its director, Nicanor was the executive director of Rice Design Alliance at the Rice University School of Architecture, director of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, and a curator at the Design, Architecture, and Digital Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before that, Nicanor spent almost a decade as a curator working on exhibitions and architecture initiatives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Accessibility & What to Expect: 

• Format: The program will begin with a brief welcome, then the speakers will engage in a moderated conversation. It will end with an optional Q&A with the audience.   
• About the space: This program will take place in Cooper Hewitt’s Lecture Room on the Ground floor of the museum. It is fully wheelchair accessible. There is an accessible restroom on the Ground floor. Read more about accessibility at Cooper Hewitt. 
• Accommodations: The program will have live CART captioning. If we can provide additional services to support your participation, email us at CHEducation@si.edu or let us know when you register. Please make your request as far in advance as possible—preferably at least ten days before the program date.  
• Recording: The program will be recorded and posted on Cooper Hewitt’s YouTube channel within two weeks.

Photo Credit: V&A East Storehouse, interior view, courtesy V&A East Storehouse.

SUPPORT