Spectacular Sculpture made of Glass and Aluminium: The New Mercedes Benz Museum

The schedule was tight, the aim was ambitious: for the new Mercedes-Benz Museum at the gates of the parent plant in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, extraordinary planners trod new paths in interdisciplinary cooperation. With investments amounting up to 150 million Euro, Mercedes Benz took pride in erecting a spectacular new building, the official grand opening of which will take place on 19 May 2006.

More than 100,000 tons of concrete were used in building the Mercedes-Benz Museum, which has a base area of 4,800 square meters and reaches a height 47.5 meters, so that its walls enclose a space of 210,000 cubic meters. Ceilings measure 33 meters across without a pillar to support them and can carry the weight of ten trucks. There are neither enclosed rooms nor right angles. All walls and ceiling, ramps and pillars are arched or twisted and merge with each other in gentle, flowing forms.

It is not even possible to sharply distinguish between horizontal and vertical areas: the so-called twists, components with a double curvature, are the building’s most spectacular innovation. They grow out of the elevator cores as vertical walls and, leaning on the next core, spiral outwards in a light arch. Behind the bright window bands they are finally received by a gently sloping staircase which links one Collection room with the next. The shell of the Museum consists of materials which also find use in vehicle manufacture: aluminum and glass.

Two offices had a decisive part in determining the final shape of the Museum: HG Merz, in close cooperation with DaimlerChrysler, developed the concept for the call for tenders and planned the details of the Museum presentation. The UN studio of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos gave the building its exciting shape and its highly innovative interior organization.

Ben van Berkel compares the design process for the new Mercedes-Benz Museum with the construction of an automobile: “The conceptual leitmotif was the development of a building along the lines of the development of a car, i.e. integration of many technical disciplines, fusion of the technical and aesthetic requirements, uncompromising ob-servance of the given parameters and simultaneous realization of innovative approaches.”

Even the design for the architecture competition made use of the latest three-dimensional design programs, which have only been available for a short time. Without such software, which penetrates the structure in all directions and generates ground plans, sections and sectional views as they are needed, the highly complex geometric shape of the building never could have been realized. To provide exact specifications to the builders, the plan of execution for the curved components contained ultraprecise coordinates of individual points in the X, Y and Z axes, referenced to an origin at the base of the atrium.

The building rises up on a 6 metre high plateau and is based on the principle of geometric infinity: three loops, infinitely intertwined with each other, form the shape of a trefoil. Projected into the three-dimensional sphere, the result was a double helix winding upward toward the sky, enabling the visitor to take two different paths through the museum: While the chronological tour through the "Legend rooms" takes one through the epochs of motoring history on a long, stepless ramp, the "Collection rooms" are connected with each other by a second spiral via narrower stairs on the outside of the building. On each level there are cross-connections which permit visitors to move between the "Legend" and "Collection" spheres as they see fit.

The journey through time picks up speed once more and reaches its climax in the last Legend room, which concludes the two tours and leads us back to the present. Thirty-four racing cars dating from 1900 to today make the Mercedes legend palpable in pure form. The roughly 120-meter-long banking in which the legendary high-performance vehicles present themselves to the viewer takes up the complex geometry of the building and simultaneously recalls tradition-steeped racing circuits. At its end the steep-bank curve blends into a vertical round where seven record-breaking vehicles are displayed to the viewer. The exhibition is complemented by “The Fascination of Technology” section, which permits looking over the shoulders of the Mercedes-Benz employees and engineers in their everyday work and simultaneously directs attention to the future of the automobile.

The detailed portrait of the Mercedes-Benz brand is made up of more than 1,450 exhibits, including 160 vehicles.

The number of visitors will be an estimated 720,000 by the end of December; from 2007 on, the number of visitors is supposed to amount to one million per year.

You can find additional information here:
http://www.museum-mercedes-benz.com