Keeping Culture: The Architecture of Storage

Museum and archival collections are often so vast that only a fraction can be shown at any one time. Behind the scenes are millions of stored objects that are rarely, if ever, presented to the public. As collections continue to grow, such warehousing practices become conspicuous and unsustainable, transforming storage from a technical concern to a pressing architectural challenge. In this context visible and visitable storage strategies have gained traction with museums, promising to increase the accessibility of reserve collections while also announcing new forms of institutional transparency and public accountability for the objects in their care.

Keeping Culture explores the scope, scale, and significance of contemporary cultural storage facilities, providing new insights into their implications for collecting and conservation, and for the broader understanding of cultural heritage. It also brings the field’s current interest in visible and open storage design into dialogue with the spatial evolution and programmatic disruptions that have defined the history of museums, and the architectural experiments that have accompanied the cultural work of keeping things.