Rotterdam, The Netherlands
MVRDV

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the first fully accessible art depot in the world, with over 151.000 art objects, is located in the Museumpark in the center of Rotterdam.
The task was to take a look behind the scenes of the museum world and make the entire art collection accessible to the public. The depot has exhibition halls, a roof garden and a restaurant, as well as an enormous amount of storage space for art and design. Visitors can delve behind the scenes of a museum and learn what preserving and maintaining a priceless art collection really means. They can also observe conservation and restoration processes, packaging and transportation of artworks.

The shape of the 39.5-metre-high depot is egg-shaped, a building ‘in the round.” Its bowl-like shape means that the first floor footprint is small, while the roof is extended as far as possible. One of the attractive features is the reflective façade, made of 6,609 square meters of glass divided into 1,664 mirrored panels. The intersecting staircases that lead visitors to the exhibition spaces and the curators’ studios The atrium is filled with 13 glass display cases that showcase a “lightly curated”, ever-changing selection of the depot’s many treasures. Each storage room has a specific climate maintained by an air conditioning system. There are 5 different climate zones suitable for artworks made of different materials: Metal, Plastic, Organic/Inorganic and Photography.

Client: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
General Contractor: BAM Bouw en Techniek
Area: 15000 m² Year: 2020
Landscape Architects: MTD Landschapsarchitecten
Photographers: Ossip van Duivenbode, Aad Hoogendoorn and Iris van den Broeke

The project is presented in the exhibition ARCHIcommunity: Architecture for the Community 2023 Venice, Italy (link to the catalogue)