The King was very impressed with the Depot, he said. “It is not only a unique building from the outside, but also fantastically beautiful on the inside,” responds Willem-Alexander. “When you walk through it, you have to remind me every time that it is a depot. It is actually an experience to go through it. I think we can congratulate Rotterdam – and actually the Netherlands – for having this. it is fantastically beautiful.”
A depot is the storage of a museum. Every museum has a depot full of art that is not currently in the galleries, but this new depot of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum is the first in the world that anyone can walk through.
For the management of Boijmans van Beuningen it was a relief that everything went well: “It has been completed. And then it will only start, of course,” says Sjarel Ex. “Bring it on with the audience. I’m really looking forward to it”, responds Ina Klaassen with a laugh.
Bowl for sugar sachets
The Depot has been in the news nationally and internationally in recent days. There was even a story that architect Winy Maas once found the inspiration for the design in a metal bowl for sugar sachets, made by a Swedish furniture giant.
“There is a huge story in the building and in its design,” says Maas. “It all came together when I looked at the design in despair and thought: do we really have to build a cube in this park? It has to be round and you have to be able to walk around it.” Maas then removed the cube from the model and replaced it with a cup. Then the architect looked around again and saw a bowl from a company from Delft. “I put that down and then it occurred to me that it also had to be reflective. That all came together then,” says Maas. “Maquettes still turn out to be very useful things.”
Publicly accessible
The Depot is therefore the first art depot in the world that is open to the public. The striking building contains no fewer than 151,000 works of art, the result of 172 years of collecting. Normally, museums only display six to ten percent of their collections, but the complete collection can be seen in the Depot. There you can also see what is involved in caring for and maintaining an art collection, for example you can watch restorers at work.
The Depot will be open to the public from Saturday.
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