 Skyline Depot Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen | |
 | |
| Established | 2021 |
|---|---|
| Location | Rotterdam, The Netherlands |
| Coordinates | 51°54′50″N04°28′17″E / 51.91389°N 4.47139°E |
| Type | Art museum |
| Collection size | 151,000 items |
| Architect | MVRDV |
| Website | www |
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen (initially called 'het Collectiegebouw' (Collection Building), popularly called 'The Pot' [1] [2] ) is an art depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. It is the first publicly accessible art depot in the world. [3]
The building is a 39.5 meter high, bowl-shaped building that is covered with reflective plates. The plates are more or less contiguous, creating a reduced mirror image of the surrounding environment. To guarantee the privacy of patients of the adjacent Erasmus MC, a number of plates have been made matt on that side. [4] Some rooms where daylight is needed are also fitted with normal glass. An aluminum-coloured IKEA bowl served as inspiration for the shape of the building. The 'Blanda Blank', a slightly shiny serving dish made of stainless steel for €3.99, happened to be on the table as a sugar bowl during preliminary discussions about the design for the building. [5]
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen was designed by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV. [6]
In 2013, there was serve flooding in the previous museum storage space. In the end, the losses were minimal but the risks associated with below sea-level storage were noted. [7]
Rather than create an out of town storage solution, the museum started considering the benefit of an open art depot. The idea of a depot had been circulating since 2007, but the flooding created extra impetus. [5] Of the museum's collection of over 150,000 artworks only 6 to 8% were on show at any time - the vast majority could not be seen by the public. Thus director of the time Sjarel Ex began to conceive of a place where the art not shown in the main museum could still be open to the public. [7]
On November 5, 2015, the Rotterdam city council approved the change to the zoning plan in the Museum Park, allowing the plans for a special art depot to be realised. Formerly, 255 acacia trees grew on the site of the building. According to some experts, they were in bad condition and could survive only if they were moved to the municipal tree depot and transplanted. Others disagreed with that view, saying that the new building would "destroy the park." [8] [9]
The first pile went into the ground on March 17, 2017. The building has seven floors. On the roof is a restaurant with 120 seats. The building contains 1,664 mirror panels with a combined surface of 6,609m2. In addition, there are four restoration studios. Inside, part of the collection is displayed in thirteen display cases. In October 2021, the costs for the building were estimated at over ninety million euros.
The entire deposit collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is stored here and is publicly accessible, on a total floor area of 15,541m2. More than 151,000 objects are housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates. Each climate is for material that requires different kind of environmental conditions - a lower temperature, for example, is needed for colour photographs. [3] Financially, the realisation was made possible in part by the De Verre Bergen foundation [10] with a gift of €17 million and a loan of approximately €35 million during the construction phase. The final cost was €94 million. [11] It was officially opened to the public in a ceremony with King Willem-Alexander on November 5, 2021. [12]
The ongoing intention of the museum is that costs will be (partially) recouped from entrance fees and from income from the rental of depot space to private art collectors (15 percent of the floor space intended for art is reserved for that purpose).
On April 29, 2022, the Depot app received a Webby Award in the category Apps and Software, Art, Culture, and Events 2022. [13] On May 12, 2022, the Depot received the Best Building award in the 'Stimulating Environments' category by the Dutch Architectural Firms Association (BNA). [14]
The building has not been universally loved. Original criticism came from the neighbouring Erasmus Medical Centre [4] . Architectural critic Oliver Wainwright noted that the conical dimensions of the building was not best suited to storing often rectangular artworks. More importantly, he commented that "the truth is that you don’t actually get to see much." - most of the artworks are on racks with limited accessibility. [5]
A film of 2023 was more positive. 'DEPOT – Reflecting Boijmans' was the name of 2023 film charting the history, construction and experience of the depot. The movie was described as "an irresistible advert for an extraordinary edifice, in which the sense of artistic and architectural possibility is nothing less than vertiginous." [15] A scientific study of social media engagement in 2023 again demonstrated the iconic popularity of the building, the authors concluding that "the results demonstrate that the exceptional building currently receives more attention on Instagram than the valuable masterpieces stored within it." [16]
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands after the national capital of Amsterdam. It is in the province of South Holland, part of the North Sea mouth of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, via the "New Meuse" inland shipping channel, dug to connect to the Meuse at first and now to the Rhine.
MVRDV is a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993, with additional offices in Berlin, New York, Paris, and Shanghai. It is currently regarded as one of the world's finest architecture firms. MVRDV is an acronym of the founding members' surnames: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries.
Sylvette is a large concrete sculpture created by Pablo Picasso and the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar, which was erected in the city of Rotterdam in 1970. It is located on the corner of Westersingel next to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The sculpture portrays a young woman with a ponytail. The model for the sculpture was Sylvette David, whom Picasso met in 1953 when she was 19. The sculpture was produced following the creation of a series of artworks, known as the Sylvette series, that Picasso made of his muse in a variety of artistic styles.
Municipal Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is an art museum in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The name of the museum is derived from its two most important donors, Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans and Daniël George van Beuningen. The museum is located at the Museumpark in the district Rotterdam Centrum, close to the Kunsthal and the Natural History Museum.
Daniël George van Beuningen was a Dutch businessman.
The Kunsthal is an art space in Rotterdam. It opened in 1992.
Museumpark is an urban park in Rotterdam, Netherlands, located between the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Westersingel, Westzeedijk and the complex of the Erasmus MC, a medical centre affiliated with the Erasmus University.
Annie Caroline Pontifex Fernhout-Toorop, known as Charley Toorop, was a Dutch painter and lithographer.
The Piet Zwart Institute is a post-graduate institute for study and research in art, media and design based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Named in memory of the Dutch designer Piet Zwart, it was inaugurated in 2001. The current postgraduate study program structure had been introduced earlier in 1999.
The following is a timeline of the history of the municipality of Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Peanut-Butter Platform is an artwork by Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers. It consists of a floor covered with peanut butter and nothing else.
Herman Doomer or Hermann Dommers was a Dutch Golden Age furniture and frame-maker who is best known today for his portrait by Rembrandt.
Wietske van Leeuwen is a Dutch ceramist, who lives and works in Monnickendam. Her works are constructed in a baroque style, with shells and fruit as recurring motifs.
Daniël (Daan) van Golden was a Dutch artist, who has been active as a painter, photographer, collagist, installation artist, wall painter and graphic artist. He is known for his meticulous paintings of motives and details of everyday life and every day images.
Helena van der Kraan-Maazel born Helena Jirina Mazl was a Czechoslovakian-born Dutch photographer and partner in the artist duo Axel en Helena van der Kraan.
Vereniging Rembrandt is a Dutch association of art patrons who raise funds to assist Dutch museums and art galleries in purchasing artworks. Since it was founded in 1883, it has helped purchase over two thousand works, including Vermeer's The Milkmaid.
Jeroen Eisinga is a contemporary video artist from the Netherlands. His work is characterised by its performance like character and its plots where an ordeal is often central. Simplicity is of key importance to Eisinga. His work is shot on film and is shot on 16mm as well as on 35mm format film.
Sabine Marcelis is a Dutch artist and designer. She has worked with brands and companies such as Audi, Céline, IKEA, Isabel Marant, Stella McCartney, and Renault. Her style typically includes pastel colours, minimalist shapes, and materials such as resin and glass, while her work focuses on themes of transparency, reflection, and translucency. She has described her work as “an investigation of light, how it can create effects and atmospheres."
Late Visitors to Pompeii is a 1931 painting by Carel Willink. It depicts four modern men at the forum of Pompeii with Mount Vesuvius in the background. The painting belongs to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen since 1933. It has been interpreted in correlation with the cultural philosophy of Oswald Spengler, who is one of the men in the painting, and themes of civilisational crisis in the fiction of Ferdinand Bordewijk.
Content in this edit is translated from the existing Dutch Wikipedia article at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen; see its history for attribution.
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