For the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s permanent collection, to be housed in the Lower Level Gallery renamed Stedelijk BASE, AMO has developed an innovative steel display system, using the latest technology, to allow visitors an open-ended route through the museum's rich collection of artworks and design pieces from 1880 to the present. The display system uses very thin self-standing walls, made of fifteen-millimeter-thick steel plates developed by Tata Steel Netherlands. The steel plates have been laser cut and coupled to create the stability required for the artworks. The thinness of the walls enables a flexible and open exhibition display; instead of breaking the space into smaller rooms, the collection is presented as a whole. The works are structured chronologically along the perimeter of the gallery space, and thematically on the steel walls which intersperse the gallery. Each wall is devoted to a specific aspect of the collection.
Visitors can choose how to navigate the Stedelijk’s collection and make unexpected connections between art and design, modern and contemporary. The traditional room-to-room museum experience is turned into a quasi-urban parcours; every turn of a corner is a new discovery, and open spaces are created between two or more walls.
Rem Koolhaas: “In a productive collaboration with Stedelijk, Arup and Tata Steel, we have created walls like screens, thanks to the slimness of the steel structure. These enable a lightness and flexibility in navigating the exhibition space, and encourage the viewer to take different paths in the space, as adventurous as circulation through any city.”
Federico Martelli: "The exhibition responds to new ways of absorbing information. Viewers have become capable of focusing on many things at the same time, and the multiplicity of information in our environment stimulates our curiosity. While the organization of the exhibition responds to thorough research of the museum's collection, it is not rigid: we have designed a landscape which allows visitors to discover associations between various artworks and objects."
