The new Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, Germany, is the first building that might happily be described as computer baroque. It twists and turns with breathtaking complexity, clever as a conjuring trick. As its architect, Ben van Berkel of UN Studio, says: ‘Now you see things and people, now you don’t. At any point, it is difficult to know where you are precisely. You can be in the right space in the wrong place, or you can be in the right place in the wrong space. The building keeps unfolding, keeps surprising you.â€
This sounds like a recipe for disaster — and indeed, in lesser hands the museum might have ended up like some Gordian-knotted bowl of architectural spaghetti. Instead, it is compelling, immensely subtle and a joy to explore.
Winding up through a lofty central atrium to the dished concrete roof are two interlaced ramps that take their design cue from Crick and Watson’s DNA spiral, and serve as the main visitors’ routes up, down, around and through the museum. Visitors are expected to begin their journey from the uppermost level, reached by capsule-like lifts with slits for windows, offering tantalising glimpses of the adventure that lies ahead.
One of the ramps leads into daylit galleries where the vehicles are on show. Altogether there are 120 cars on display, representing the company’s 120-year lineage, together with 40 vans, buses and lorries — not to mention engines, an aircraft, boats and railway vehicles. Most of these machines are constructed on a heroic, even architectural, scale.
The other ramp descends through a sequence of theatrical galleries, some dark, others bright, telling the story of Mercedes-Benz. Visitors can switch from ramp to ramp, so that the history of the company can be illustrated by its products from any given time.
From many vantage points along the ramps it is possible to see, and to cross-reference, other parts of the museum. Remarkably, though, you cannot lose your way inside: just go with the architectural flow, and its magic reels on by in a genuinely exciting and almost cinematic way.
The museum’s design team, headed by UN Studio, a Dutch architectural practice led by Van Berkel, Caroline Bos and Tobias Wallisser, has proved that it is possible for an important new city building to be inventive without recourse to overt gimmickry. It is a building UN Studio has been trying to create in one way or another for some years, a genuine and positive meeting between the potentially overwrought world of computer-aided design and an older architecture that might, in fact, be described as jet-age baroque.
What it has achieved is an architectural puzzle that feels as coherent and assured as Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling Guggenheim Museum in New York, or Eero Saarinen’s swooping TWA terminal at JFK airport — two buildings much admired by UN Studio, and as exciting today as they were half a century ago.
Set alongside the mighty Daimler-Benz production plant, the new museum, which recently opened to the public, rises alongside the elevated B14 motorway and acts as a new gateway to the city. Its surroundings are dramatic and unapologetically industrial.
The building, though, unfolds not from some brutal factory yard, but from an artificial hill indented with broad steps that lead up to the public entrance. This makes an elegant reference to Stuttgart’s urban topography: the Swabian city is built on many hills, its streets linked by hundreds of public stairs.
Stuttgart was once a fine medieval city adorned with baroque designs, but it lost 60% of its historic buildings to Allied bombing during World War II. Since then, a number of its historic collections have been on show at nearby Ludwigsburg, one of the most ambitious of all baroque palaces.
You feel as though UN Studio were constantly alert to the potentially baroque nature and setting of the building they were designing. The interior of the museum is full of echoes of the geographical richness outside. Here is a generous, light-filled industrial palace formed from hard and soft materials, raw and polished concrete, straight lines and curves. It’s all encased in a continuous band of glazing made up of 1 800 triangular windows spiralling up and around the building.
From inside, the plan of the building reveals itself as an enormous trefoil, or clover leaf, an understated reference to Mercedes-Benz’s famous three-pointed star emblem.
What is difficult to grasp, until you have spent some time wandering around the building, is that this plan is far from being two-dimensional; instead, it curves and loops up and away from the floor in smooth concrete folds, twisting and turning in ways that makes floors become walls, and walls ceilings. The interior is, in fact, one fluid, continuously unfolding space.
UN Studio turned to the best pos-sible specialists to realise its dream building. The complex geometry and mathematics involved in its design were calculated by German computer-whizz Arnold Walz and the ingenious structural engineering was entrusted to Stuttgart’s Werner Sobek.
The brief from Mercedes-Benz senior management and the museum design team — headed by Professor HG Merz, designer of the fine Zeppelin Museum at Friedrichshafen — was, says Van Berkel, ‘the clearest we have ever been givenâ€. It shows, particularly in the way visitors are encouraged, almost lured, through the building.
Van Berkel and Caroline Bos have set out the design intentions underpinning the Mercedes-Benz museum in a lively new book, UN Studio:Design Models — Architecture, Urbanism, Infrastructure. The text is brief, original and clear.
Architecture, say Bos and Van Berkel, is a ‘halfway art located between art and airportsâ€. In other words, a necessary fusion of the sublime and the everyday. This, they say, is a challenge for architects everywhere. If architects respond to technical briefs in purely matter-of-fact ways, they are in danger of ‘sculpting the statistics, painting with information in bold brush strokes or refined minimalist gesturesâ€, and so producing the glassy-eyed designs globalised cities assume when no one is keeping proper watch over them.
What Bos and Van Berkel want to create is an architecture that tries ‘to set the static in motionâ€. This is, indeed, a trick of the baroque — and one that works brilliantly in the design of the Mercedes-Benz museum. Here, the architecture appears to have absorbed the pent-up energy of the cars on show, while the cars gain a sense of momentum from the architecture wrapping dynamically around them. The building is utterly convincing. —