The Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility. More than 154,000 objects are gathered here, arranged by climate in fourteen compartments. Only a small part ever fitted into the museum building next door. Here the rest hangs, lies and stands: paintings, design, prints, an installation the size of a gallery. Visitors walk through the atrium with its display cases and can, with a guide, enter a storage room. Not every room is freely accessible. Paper and photographs stay in closed cabinets; viewing is by appointment.
The Depot also programmes presentations. Conservation is sometimes the subject itself, as with research into Van Gogh’s poplars. That is something different from a classic exhibition gallery, but it is a programme all the same. You see restorers at work, art handlers lifting, and a collection waiting on racks. The tension lies in the collision of things that would never hang side by side in a museum: a medieval sculpture next to a twentieth-century chair, because both need the same humidity.
Look at the mirrored façade first. Then at a single shelf. The façade promises Rotterdam. The shelf promises how a museum decides what the air is allowed to do.
