The Victoria & Albert Museum in East London. Toronto native Brendan Cormier curates the museum's new sites, which aim to attract a broad audience.Hufton + Crow/Supplied
The Victoria & Albert Museum Storehouse in East London is a vast, densely packed repository of objects. Textiles, televisions, busts and swords rise on shelves to a ceiling 20 metres high.
Walking through after hours one recent evening, Brendan Cormier pointed out objects in passing – a 1960s Moulton bicycle, a modern chair by Ernest Race. But what about those statues on the right? “Don’t get me started,” he responded with a laugh. “The problem of being chief curator of 250,000 objects is that I can only selectively tell you what stuff is.”
Cormier’s task is not to sort through the mass, but to help visitors connect with it. He is chief curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s two new sites: the Storehouse, which opened last year to broad acclaim, and V&A East, which opened April 18. Their goal is to open up one of the world’s biggest design collections to a broader audience.
Brendan Cormier.Lewis Vorn/Supplied
For a Torontonian raised in a country with no real culture of design, this is a heady place to end up. His work makes a clear argument: that all forms of human creativity are valuable, and that today’s citizens can see themselves in the archive.
The V&A has an encyclopedic collection that spans art, decorative arts and design. Cormier likes to use an old term to describe his focus: applied arts. “All the stuff around us, from buildings to objects to spoons to lampposts, has creative thought put into it,” he explained. “Our job here is to say: ‘Hey, pay attention.’”
Cormier connects forms of making across time and across cultures, revealing an ever-changing flow of human creativity. “This museum looks at our collection through a contemporary lens,” Cormier said. “It asks, ’How is creativity changing in today’s world, and how can a museum reveal that change?’”
The new V&A East building is organized around that premise. The great Irish architects O’Donnell & Tuomey have delivered a five-storey wrapped in a honey-coloured concrete lattice that evokes a Balenciaga dress, or, from certain angles, a giant crab. “The museum has to have a singular identity,” architect John Tuomey says. “And then it has to also invite participation.”
It does, aided by its setting. Like all U.K. national museums, it is largely free. Neighbours can wander over from the park or the nearby shopping mall, drift past the ground-floor restaurant and enter a collection arranged to meet them where they are.
Cormier’s team has assembled a permanent exhibition titled Why We Make. “It’s radically mixing up everything,” he said, during a tour of the collection. “We have conversations between objects that might span 5,000 years in age and span across the globe.” These are joined by purpose: A 19th-century map of Jain pilgrimage routes and a digital installation tracking airline routes across North America, two strongly visual records of connections across the globe.
These galleries feature a range of pieces from Beyoncé’s ‘Daria’ dress, designed by Molly Goddard and worn in her 2020 visual album Black Is King, to Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of the Jamaican-British food writer Melissa Thompson. The latter is juxtaposed with a bench where visitors can sit and put themselves on display.
The V&A's encyclopedic collection spans art, decorative arts and design.Hufton + Crow/Supplied
The exhibition design by JA Projects riffs on the lit signs of the local main streets. “We’re hoping that youths will find their way in here and just hang out,” says V&A East project director Jen McLachlan. “We’ll have to have some rules about food and drink, but we’ll find our way.”
This is culture as a tool to redefine the metropolis. The museum sits on the site of the 2012 Olympics, in what has been the heartland of London’s working class. In the years since the Olympics, London has encouraged the birth of a cultural quarter, East Bank. It is anchored by a new BBC facility; the Sadler’s Wells East dance theatre, a friendly brick box that is also designed by O’Donnell & Tuomey; the London College of Fashion by Allies & Morrison; and V&A East. Just across the green expanse of the Olympic Park is the Storehouse, in a shed that was once the Olympic broadcast centre.
The Storehouse’s design, by New York architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro, is restrained: polished concrete, exposed ducts and a comfortable café with plywood counters.
Its brilliant curatorial gambit is to frame particular objects against the vast bulk of the V&A’s collection, which rests here on open shelves. You walk up a narrow stair, or rise in a generic elevator, into the central collections hall. To one side rests a Gretsch hollow-body guitar that belonged to PJ Harvey. To the left, a massive fragment from the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a social housing complex that was an emblem of postwar social housing and then of its demolition.
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Once you get up to the second floor of the Storehouse, you can peek through the Robin Hood Gardens windows to see the red-and-purple graphic wallpaper that hung in the halls. Nearby, Cormier’s team has deployed recordings of oral histories from residents. This story bridges the gap between global design culture and the concerns of regular citizens. Nearby, displays tell the stories of local brickmakers and a 1970s feminist press.
It’s a nimble model of curation that allows visitors a degree of freedom and constantly renews the curatorial offerings. “There’s something democratic about it,” Cormier says. “Everybody’s eyes can wander and pick out what they’re interested in.”
The Storehouse is a riff on the genre of the “cabinet of curiosities,” the Victorian collections that threw together colonial spoils. It makes a bold gambit: To open up the archive, to tell accurate stories about tens of thousands of objects and also to let the public appreciate the quantity of what has come before.
Like all U.K. national museums, entry to the V&A is largely free.Hufton + Crow/Supplied
Cormier has spent two decades getting here – entering the museum world, as he says, “through the side door.” Raised in the suburban neighbourhood of New Toronto, he studied urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, but the field didn’t suit him – it was too abstract, he recalls. Meanwhile the related field of urban design, which focuses on blocks and streets, meant “a New Urbanism-lite vision for how the city should be,” generating plans that “would never really be followed and weren’t very interesting in the first place.”
Chasing more imaginative solutions, he formed a collective called Department of Unusual Certainties with two friends, and they self-assigned research projects to understand phenomena such as the design of tiny parks.
After urban-design training at the Bauhaus in Germany, Cormier took a left turn into publishing in Rotterdam as an editor with design journal Volume. After another project in Shenzhen, China, he applied to become curator of the V&A’s new gallery in that city, and got the job. “It was the most remarkable coup of my life,” he recalls.
At the V&A, most curators are scholars with narrow academic training. Cormier is a generalist and a communicator. “What’s important to me isn’t as much the individual objects as the systems and landscapes that go into making them,” he says. On the top floor of V&A East, Cormier has brought together photographs of the workshops and recycling plants that used to occupy this part of London. For him, the museum is part of a process worthy of contemplation.
There are few such opportunities in Canada. No major Canadian museum specializes in design; the only specialized architecture museum, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is heavily international in its focus.
Cormier’s career path helps tell this story. Two Toronto institutions that served as his stepping stones – the Design Exchange and the small Architecture Gallery at Harbourfront Centre – are now defunct. As Cormier wrote in an op-ed for The Globe, the Design Exchange’s 2019 closure left Canada “one of the only advanced economies in the world not to have its own design museum.”
At the V&A he is helping to reframe the systems that shape our world, and to build a base of knowledge that will someday pay dividends for British, if not Canadian, society. “What happens when you have a population fluent in the appreciation of architecture, fluent in the idea that design can transform a society?” he asks. “That’s an interesting thing in the Canadian context. What kind of country do we want to build?”