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The White Spheres of the Porsche Cosmos
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- “Porsche Idea,” "Product History,” and “Thematic Islands” are the three core elements of the museum concept.
- (© picture-alliance/ dpa)
The arts and culture pages have already defined a special category for it – “carchitecture” – by which they mean the sensational buildings with which the German car groups in particular promote themselves.
It’s all about the two interfaces between the companies and the public. On the one hand, it’s the act of handing over a car to the end customer, which these days they like to stage as though it were an initiation ritual, on the other hand, the company museum as a haven of company tradition is a factor of brand image maintenance that can hardly be underestimated. Now that Daimler in Stuttgart has provided a spectacular example, the sports car manufacturer Porsche, which also calls Stuttgart home, is following suit with a museum that is no less spectacular.
At the moment, Viennese architects Delugan Meissl – despite a certain sense of having arrived – still rank among the avant-garde who are able to design “signature buildings” like this. The plot could hardly pose more of a problem. In the Zuffenhausen industrial area, bordered by a busy motorway feeder and an S-Bahn railway embankment, it does have the right address however, Porscheplatz 5 in the middle of the Porsche production facilities, and it has convenient transport links being directly adjacent to the Neuwirtshaus S-Bahn station.
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- The Porsche Museum opened to visitors on January 31, 2009.
- (© picture-alliance/ dpa)
The shape of the museum can be appreciated most impressively from the station: the plinths rising out of the ground, the enormous protracted extent of the monolithic exhibition area elevated on stilts, the stunning cantilevers, the racy dynamics, the elegant suspension. Massive pylons support the building on high, admittedly not where you would have instinctively expected and where the weight-bearing points should be, but at other points – emerging at frighteningly oblique angles – as if the idea were to defy not gravity but a centrifugal force.
From the Porscheplatz aspect, the museum comes across as somewhat sedate with its weighty front. The fine diamond network of the white-painted metal façade plays over the hulk of the building, which contrasts with the sleek aerodynamic motors inside. It’s another form of dynamics, not a mobile one but a topological, architectural one. The museum seems to be an artificial and artistic artifact, an expressionist building sculpture that understands how to assert itself as a stark and solitary entity in its heterogeneous environment.
The view of the exhibition area from below is actually supposed to act as a mirror, but the diamond-shaped polished stainless steel plates do not form a straight horizon, but more of a moving, shimmering water surface. The architects have designed the entrance area to be below the exhibition area.
Right in the foyer visitors are prepared for the white, futuristic world that awaits them. The vintage car workshop can be viewed from the café/bar, where the exhibits of the “museum on wheels” are being prepared and maintained for external assignments. The escalator eventually leads to the top, penetrates the glazed roof and emerges in the large exhibition area from below.
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- Porsche celebrates its 60th anniversary as a sports-car manufacturer this year.
- (© picture-alliance/ dpa)
Suddenly the area opens up, bright and expansive. A panoramic view of the whole spatial continuum with its ramps, staircases and galleries presents itself. The area was developed from the idea of a spiral. Visitors follow it along its course through the exhibition from the upper level down to its starting point. This route with plenty of variety through levels of differing heights opens and closes up again, forming various zones, plazas and roads, on which the vehicles can be presented in diverse ways.
The exhibition design by HG Merz connects seamlessly with the architecture, suits the purist space and avoids over-the-top razzle-dazzle. The highlight is the LED podium for displaying the 917 models, which emerges dynamically out of the ground to cover an area of 180 square meters and is backlit with 380.000 diodes.
The main restaurant at the head of the building is visually partitioned from the upper exhibition area with a glazed concertina partition. Unfortunately, it shocks with its kitschy rustic steakhouse atmosphere, which the management ordered from an appropriate pub decorator – an extraordinarily embarrassing faux-pas that should be corrected as soon as possible.
Visitors turn around again quickly and experience the “Cosmos Porsche” in the almost unreal atmosphere of the white area, the like of which has never been seen before, in a congenial ambience of high-tech and ambitious design.
Written by Falk Jaeger, a historian specializing in architecture and an architecture critic in Berlin. Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut
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