The Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen has opened a publicly accessible depot

Rotterdam – The Dutch Museum of Fine Arts and Design Boijmans Van Beuningen has opened a new attraction for visitors – a publicly accessible depot, where over 150,000 works from its collections can be viewed. It aims to offer visitors immediate contact with art without any curator intervention; the facilities, including restoration workshops, will also be on display, wrote Reuters.

The building with a mirrored façade, named the Depot, designed by the architectural studio MVRDV, is a new landmark in Museumpark in Rotterdam. The project creators realized the idea of the museum's management, which had been considering making the depots accessible for a long time. A major motivation was also the effort to move collections from underground storage, where they risked damage from flooding.

Museum director Sjarrel Ex pointed out that most exhibition institutions only show a fraction of the exhibits, and an astounding 93 percent of collections are housed in depots, to which the public usually does not have access. In Rotterdam, they wanted to change this and state that their depot can be visited by up to 60,000 visitors each year – either with a guide or independently along pre-defined routes.

"Things that are out of sight often fall into oblivion," claims Ex, who believes that it can be a tremendous experience that the works in the depot are not arranged according to a clear interpretive key, and viewers can see paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other artifacts from the Middle Ages to the present.

The depot building, with 16 floors of storage and a central atrium, is designed to be discreet despite its size. This is aided by a façade made up of 1,664 mirrored panels that reflect the surrounding greenery and the sky above Rotterdam, which is nicknamed Manhattan on the Maas. On the roof of the museum, there is a birch grove intended to compensate for the space that the building takes away from the park.