Mercedes-Benz Museum
The Mercedes-Benz Museum is an automotive museum housed in Stuttgart, Germany. Stuttgart is home to the Mercedes-Benz brand and the international headquarters of Daimler AG. The current building, which stands directly outside the main gate of the Daimler factory in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, was designed by UN Studio.
It is based on a unique cloverleaf concept using three overlapping circles with the center removed to form a triangular atrium. Previously, the museum was housed in a dedicated building within the factory complex and visitors had in recent decades been transported from the main gate by a secured shuttle.
The building's height and "double helix" interior were designed to maximise space, providing 16,500 square metres of exhibition space on a footprint of just 4,800 square metres. The museum contains more than 160 vehicles; some dating back to the very earliest days of the motor engine. The museum provides visitors with free audio tours in a variety of languages. In 2007, the year it was opened the museum was visited by 860,000 people.
The Museum has already been declared one of the most bewilderingly brilliant structures of the new century.
Unrivalled Formwork Technology
With an impressive height of 48 metres, the museum is constructed on a 6m high man-made elevation directly before the gates of the main plant in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim. The museum itself only occupies 3,500 m² of the total 60,000 m² site area. However, the architecturally striking building has an exhibition area of almost 17,000 m² and provides sufficient space for a journey through the past, present and future of the automobile with the world-famous star.
The team from UN studio Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, Amsterdam, were awarded the contract and the foundation stone for this unique structure was laid. Eighteen months later, the concrete shell for the four sections containing the museum, building technology, connecting building and arena as well as the multi-storey car park was completed.
Visitors are brought to the top of the building by elevators where two spiral walkways wind their way downwards providing easy and comfortable access to the Myth and Collection exhibition areas. 160 vehicles and various other collections can be viewed on a total of nine levels.
Design
With limited time to design and realise one of the most complicated structures recently conceived, Dutch firm UN Studio brought in some expertise. 246 companies and engineering firms were engaged for the Mercedes Benz Museum, a castle and a labyrinth described by the Guardian's architecture critic, Jonathan Glancey, as "jet-age baroque".
The structure of the Museum - three overlapping circles layered over eight floors in a twisting spiral - needed the expertise of Stuttgart University's Werner Sobek, head of the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design. Petra Blaisse, an interior and landscape architect known for her dramatic collaborations with Rem Koolhaas, worked on special elements.
But if forming networks of knights and squires is the basis of UN Studio's work, so too is strong, centralised organisation. Parametric design, reducing the labyrinth to a single diagram or map, is the key. "The only solution was to control the geometry of the building as completely as possible using the latest computer technology," says Ben van Berkel, UN Studio's co-founder and director. "Digitally controlling the geometry made it possible to incorporate any kind of change quickly and efficiently, immediately knowing the effects of that change on all other aspects of the building." UN Studio's computer wunderkind for Mercedes Benz was Arnold Walz.
Un-Studio
The Mercedes Benz Museum was the logical culmination of UN Studio's systems of practice. Founded in 1988 by Amsterdam and London-trained Van Berkel and art historian Caroline Bos, the firm really began to take shape with the Erasmus Bridge commission (1990-6) in Rotterdam. It was also the first test of the firm's integrative design principles.
All the pieces, the five differently shaped concrete piers, the railings, the landings, the joints and the fixtures, were designed integrally, the finish of each crucial to the materialisation of the whole. And all the functional processes of the Museum- as a public space, as visual marker, as construction - were modeled simultaneously, brought together with increasingly sophisticated CAD-CAM methods.
UN Studio's shape-shifting is above all a means for solving problems. The firm keeps a kind of source book of useful shapes, against which all their projects are classified.
Double-Helix Concept
The double helix contains the Mercedes Benz Museum's dual exhibitions - a history of the corporation and a collection of historic cars, trucks and airplanes - and it takes visitors downward from the eighth floor on a journey that would take six hours to properly complete. The visitor is brought to the top in a capsule-like escalator with an opening at eye level, through which historical images can be seen projected onto the walls of the central atrium. From here, wayfaring is encouraged.
You can proceed directly down a chronological path, or indirectly through crossed time zones, moving between the historical data and the machines via linkages in the double helix. Although it can not been seen from the inside, the helix is formed out of an abstraction of the Mercedes Benz symbol, out of a trefoil of three overlapping circles.
The centre of the circles makes a void, a triangular atrium that cuts light through the Museum's core. The semi-circular floors rotate around the central atrium forming horizontal plateaus which alternate between double and single heights. Oblique surfaces meet symmetrical curves, tucking deep, asymmetrical exhibition space into folds in the Museum's body. The line you follow through the labyrinth is a wall, and then a ceiling, and then a floor: the Museum "Tries to set the static in motion" says Van Berkel, "As if it wants to prove that architecture is still alive."
The success of this structure resulted from an inventive consideration of the circulation and function of the spaces for a museum. The successful adaptation of the interior volumes, the routing logics and the structure is achieved by a complex geometric composition.
To explain the project of the architects Ben van Berkel compare the building with three emblematic projects of the twentieth century: the National Gallery by Mies Van der Rohe in Berlin for the use of wide spans and free plateaus, the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright´s in New York, for the use of ramps and the integration of routes of movement and as exhibition locations, and finally the Pompidou Centre by Rogers and Piano, for highlighting the spaces reserved for circulation of the public an a special design allowing the technical constraints to be considered.
Project Team
Design: Ben van Berkel / UNStudio
Construction: UNStudio with Wenzel + Wenzel, Stuttgart
Exhibition, concept and design: H.G. Merz
Interior architecture: UNStudio with Concrete Architectural Associates,
Structure: Werner Sobek Ingenieure, Stuttgart
Surveying: Arnold Walz, Stuttgart
Engineer (climate): Transsolar Energietechnik, Stuttgart
Infrastructure: David Johnston, Arup, London
