Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the world’s first fully accessible art depot, will open its doors in September 2021 at Museumpark in the centre of Rotterdam. The assignment was to offer a glimpse behind the scenes of the museum world and make the whole art collection accessible to the public. 

The reflective round volume projected by MVRDV responds to its surroundings. The Depot features exhibition halls, a rooftop garden, and a restaurant, in addition to an enormous amount of storage space for art and design. 

The on-site works began in the spring of 2017, and three and a half years later, the Depot is complete and ready to shelter the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum collection. It has six floors with different climatic situations ensuring ideal conditions for art storage and the public. 
MVRDV gave the circular 39.5-metre Depot as small a footprint as the programme allowed, in order to leave as much of the park intact as possible. Thanks to the mirrored façade panels, the building reflects both the park and the city. 

The Depot gives visitors the opportunity to view the museum's 151,000 artworks even when they are not being displayed in the museum’s curated exhibitions, and thanks to the building’s five zones, each with its own individual climate environment, private and corporate collections can also be preserved in the building under museum conditions.
 

Description of project by MVRDV

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the first publicly accessible art depot in the world designed by MVRDV, has completed construction. Located in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, the depot features a new type of experience for museum visitors: a sturdy engine room where the complete collection of 151,000 objects is made accessible to the public. In addition to the various storage and care areas, the depot has a restaurant and an award-winning rooftop forest at a height of 35 metres. The construction completion paves the way for interior furnishings and the long process of moving the museum’s complete collection into their new storage facility.

A 39.5-metre-high building ‘in the round’, the depot’s bowl-like form has a relatively small footprint. This form ensures that at the ground level, existing views into and routes through the Museumpark remain unimpeded and reduces the impact on underground water buffers, while an expansive rooftop public space with a restaurant provides access to inspiring views of Rotterdam. Comprising 6,609 square metres of glass subdivided into 1,664 mirrored panels, its reflective façade wears the trappings of whatever surrounds it: people passing by, Museumpark’s leafy grounds, the clouds, and Rotterdam’s dynamic city skyline. Thanks to this reflection, the building is already fully integrated into its surroundings, despite its not insignificant size of 15,000 m2. It enlivens its surroundings while establishing strong relationships with the park and the neighbouring buildings.

In the depot, artefacts will be stored and exhibited according to their climatic requirements, as opposed to movement or era. Each storage space is climate controlled and organized into five different climate zones, arranged according to works of art produced with different materials: metal, plastic, organic/inorganic, and photography. 

The building’s eyecatcher is the atrium with crisscrossing staircases and suspended glass display cases showing exhibitions of works selected by museum curators. This atrium will lead visitors to exhibition rooms and curators’ studios, offering them a unique behind-the-scenes experience and the chance to learn how a world-renowned museum maintains and cares for its art collection. Art is displayed throughout the building, beginning in the ground floor lobby and continuing along the entire route through the building, extending even to the rooftop restaurant. Outside this restaurant, a rooftop forest at a height of 35 metres will provide another public attraction, accessible via an express elevator from the ground floor, and populated by 75 multi-stemmed birch trees standing several metres tall. The rooftop offers visitors breath-taking vistas across the city of Rotterdam.

“With this construction completion, now the museum and the users can start to inhabit the building and fill its spaces with priceless art. Although it will take another year before the real opening, the completion is a special moment for all: the museum, the city of Rotterdam, Stichting De Verre Bergen and of course for the contractor BAM, the many construction workers and subcontractors who persisted during the difficult circumstances we all faced due to the pandemic. The depot design is daring, and its success comes from the direct dialogue with all parties involved – from the person calculating the exact curvature of the mirroring panels and the construction worker who put up the glass vitrines to the company that co-designed our rooftop forest.” 

Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV.

 

“This is a working building in which the most important consideration is what the building can do: to look after our collection while still being open to the public. Next year the entire collection of Boijmans Van Beuningen will once again be visible on one spot for the first time since 1935. We are convinced that making the collection accessible shows how much we care and how well we take care of it. This is something that the inhabitants of Rotterdam will be proud of; something that they want to see with their own eyes, because they partly own this enormous artistic treasure.”

Sjarel Ex and Ina Klaassen, directors Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Depot Boijmans Van Beunigen is a collaboration between Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Municipality of Rotterdam and the De Verre Bergen foundation.

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Architects
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Design team
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Sanne van der Burgh, Arjen Ketting, Gerard Heerink, Jason Slabbynck, Rico van de Gevel, Marjolein Marijnissen, Remco de Haan.
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Collaborators
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Principal in charge.- Winy Maas. Partner.- Fokke Moerel. Competition Team.- Sanne van der Burgh, Marta Pozo, Gerard Heerink, Elien Deceuninck, Saimon Gomez Idiakez, Jose Ignacio Velasco Martin, Jason Slabbynck, Mariya Gyaurova, Lukasz Brzozowski. Strategy & Development.- Jan Knikker, Irene Start. Visualization.- Antonio Luca Coco, Matteo Artico, Carlo Cattó. Structure.- IMd Raadgevend Ingenieurs. Cost engineering.- BBN. Installations.- RHDHV. Façade consultants.- ABT Building. Physics.- Peutz.
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Client
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Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, De Verre Bergen Foundation, Municipality of Rotterdam.
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Builder
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BAM.
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Area
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15000 m².
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Budget
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€ 55,000,000.
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Dates
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2020.
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Location
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Museumpark 24, 3015 CX Rotterdam, Netherlands.
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Photography
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MVRDV was founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The practice engages globally in providing solutions to contemporary architectural and urban issues. A highly collaborative, research-based design method involves clients, stakeholders and experts from a wide range of fields from early on in the creative process. The results are exemplary, outspoken projects, which enable our cities and landscapes to develop towards a better future.

The products of MVRDV’s unique approach to design vary, ranging from buildings of all types and sizes, to urban plans and visions, numerous publications, installations and exhibitions. Built projects include the Netherlands Pavilion for the World EXPO 2000 in Hannover; the Market Hall, a combination of housing and retail in Rotterdam; the Pushed Slab, a sustainable office building in Paris’ first eco-district; Flight Forum, an innovative business park in Eindhoven; the Silodam Housing complex in Amsterdam; the Matsudai Cultural Centre in Japan; the Unterföhring office campus near Munich; the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam; the Ypenburg housing and urban plan in The Hague; the Didden Village rooftop housing extension in Rotterdam; the music centre De Effenaar in Eindhoven; the Gyre boutique shopping center in Tokyo; a public library in Spijkenisse; an international bank headquarters in Oslo, Norway; and the iconic Mirador and Celosia housing in Madrid.

Current projects include a variety of housing projects in the Netherlands, France, China, India, and other countries; a community centre in Copenhagen and a cultural complex in Roskilde, Denmark, a public art depot in Rotterdam, the transformation of a mixed use building in central Paris, an office complex in Shanghai, and a commercial centre in Beijing, and the renovation of an office building in Hong Kong. MVRDV is also working on large scale urban masterplans in Bordeaux and Caen, France and the masterplan for an eco-city in Logroño, Spain. Larger scale visions for the future of greater Paris, greater Oslo, and the doubling in size of the Dutch new town Almere are also in development.

MVRDV first published a manifesto of its work and ideas in FARMAX (1998), followed by MetaCity/Datatown (1999), Costa Iberica (2000), Regionmaker (2002), 5 Minutes City (2003), KM3 (2005), Spacefighter (2007) and Skycar City (2007), and more recently The Vertical Village (with The Why Factory, 2012) and the firm’s first monograph of built works MVRDV Buildings (2013). MVRDV deals with issues ranging from global sustainability in large scale studies such as Pig City, to small, pragmatic architectural solutions for devastated areas such as New Orleans.

The work of MVRDV is exhibited and published worldwide and has received numerous international awards. One hundred architects, designers and urbanists develop projects in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative design process which involves rigorous technical and creative investigation. MVRDV works with BIM and has official in-house BREEAM and LEED assessors.

Together with Delft University of Technology, MVRDV runs The Why Factory, an independent think tank and research institute providing an agenda for architecture and urbanism by envisioning the city of the future.

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