About the depot
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen was opened on 5 November 2021 by King Willem-Alexander. The world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility, designed by the architectural firm MVRDV, is situated next to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. It is the first building in the world that makes a museum’s entire collection public while also providing behind-the-scenes glimpses of how a museum works. In addition, it provides space to store private and corporate collections. The depot is a gesamtkunstwerk and a new design icon for Rotterdam.
The world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen preserves the museum’s entire art collection and takes care of it, and offers visitors a behind-the-scenes view of how a museum works. In the depot, fourteen compartments are fitted with shelves, racks and cabinets for all different kinds of artworks. There are compartments for paintings, metal objects, organic and non-organic materials, and black-and-white and colour photography. The depot compartments have climate control; the temperature and humidity are kept stable. From the circulation route, the stairs and the lift you can see the artworks from a variety of angles. Accompanied by a guide, you can also enter a storage compartment.
More than 154,000 artworks
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection is world famous. It has been growing since 1849 and currently comprises more than 154,000 objects, of which around 89,000 are prints and drawings. Only eight percent of the collection could be displayed in the museum building. The majority of the works were stored in facilities that were not accessible to the public. In Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen you can see the entire collection, arranged not by period or art movement but based on the objects’ climate requirements.
Facts & figures
|
Height: |
39.5 metres |
|
Diameter: |
Bottom 40 metres, top 60 metres |
|
Design: |
MVRDV |
|
Amount of floors: |
Ground floor and six stories |
|
Floor area: |
15.541 m2 |
|
Climate zones: |
5 |
|
Professional restoration studios: |
4 |
|
Capacity rooftop restaurant: |
120 seats |
|
Storage that can be rented for private and institutional collections: |
1.900 m2 |
|
Glass: |
6.609 m2, divided into 1664 mirrored panels |
|
The depot offers space for: |
more than 152,000 artworks from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and of private collections and corporate collections |
The depot is a workplace
As soon as you enter the building, you can immediately see through the glass walls into the space where the artworks are unloaded. As you wander through the building, through large windows you can see inside the storage compartments, see restorers at work and see how the artworks are prepared and packed for transportation. Or unpacked if they return after being part of an exhibition. If you opt for a guided tour, you can enter one of the storage compartments during your visit and experience Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s amazing collection close-up.
Design
The depot was built by assignment of the municipality of Rotterdam. At 39.5 meters, the building, designed by architect Winy Maas, co-founder of the Rotterdam-based architecture practice MVRDV, is as high as the tower of the neighbouring Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. It has an unusual circular form and a striking mirrored façade. The façade contains 6609 square meters of glass, divided into 1664 mirrored panels. As a result, the building reflects its green surroundings and Rotterdam's skyline. The park in which it stands is echoed in the roof garden with a total of seventy-five birch trees ans some twenty pine trees. In aerial views of the depot, the greenery of the roof garden blends with the trees in the park.
Interior
The depot’s mirrored facade that reflects the surrounding city creates a spectacular exterior, but the interior is just as impressive. Boijmans has teamed up with artists John Körmeling and Marieke van Diemen to design various aspects of the depot’s interior. Visual artist Pipilotti Rist made a enchanting artwork for the exterior of the building.
John Körmeling
Artist and architect John Körmeling has designed the interior, including the lighting for the entrance hall. He has replaced the masonry wall between the entrance hall and the storage compartments with a glass wall, allowing the depot’s circular space to be seen. In the hall, he has designed a free-standing balcony that follows the curve of the building with bright pink lockers on the balcony. Below is the Depot Store with bright pink elements that stands out in the grey space. The beauty of the design is that it allows visitors to see everything going on in the circular building. The balcony has been fabricated by BlonkStaal in Schoonhoven.
Marieke van Diemen
Artist Marieke van Diemen has designed The Maze: a three-dimensional labyrinth in the depot’s atrium with floating display cases in which objects from the collection are displayed. The atrium extends from the ground floor to the roof at the centre of the depot building. This central space is 40 meters high, 28 meters wide and 6 meters deep and is traversed by zigzag stairs à la Giovanni Piranesi and has two glass elevator shafts on one end and a transparant large art elevator at the other end of the atrium.
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss artist who named herself after Pippi Longstocking. Like Pippi Longstocking, she sees herself as a woman who explores the world in a playful way. This world-famous artist’s colourful work has been seen in numerous top museums. In Rotterdam, too, where ‘Elixir’, a major retrospective of her work, was staged in 2009. Now, more than ten years later, Rist is working with the Boijmans again. The video light installation Het Leven Verspillen Aan Jou is visible from sunset to midnight on the public square in front of the depot, reflected in its facade.
More informationSustainability
The depot building has been designed to make it highly sustainable. It is constructed from sustainably sourced materials, such as recycled aggregates in the concrete. The choice for innovative materials and technologies results in extremely efficient energy consumption. The building uses a ground-coupled heat exchanger, contains a new system for climate control and has rainwater storage that provides water for the roof garden and for flushing the toilets. The depot is also equipped with LED lighting and waterless urinals. The roof has been planted with trees (birches and pine trees), grasses and sedum plants, and solar panels on the roof supply the depot building with electricity.