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| Rolling out the new Mercedes-Benz museum |
July 6, 2006 |
Loaded with enough wiring to stretch from Toronto to Montreal,
the new museum is a technology showplace for the world’s oldest cars
It’s a funny thing about history—the facts themselves don’t change, but our perspective alters, and with that our feelings about the past. For DaimlerChrysler AG, greater competition in the luxury market makes it increasingly important to highlight its historical connections to the founders of the automobile. The company has unveiled an architectural showcase chronicling where the automobile started and how far it has come.
The Mercedes-Benz museum greets visitors like a concrete and glass Sphinx as they drive into the city of Stuttgart. The postmodern fusion of glass and concrete seems avant-garde for a building designed to showcase old cars, yet the museum, opened on May 19, 2006, is much more than that. It is an attempt to tie the present with the past, to retrace the company’s roots back to the mid-1880s, to the very dawn of the automotive era.
Technically, of course, Mercedes-Benz branded vehicles didn’t hit the road until 1926. Nevertheless the Benz name can be traced back to the first-ever automobile, Karl Benz’s three-wheeled Motorwagen, patented in 1886, and to his design for the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine the year before that. The Mercedes name, plus the famous three-pointed star, all appeared on vehicles from the early 1900s, providing links to the feelings the company wants to evoke: luxury, performance and advanced technological prowess.
The new museum was contemplated as far back as 10 years ago, said its managing director Max-Gerrit von Pein. A previous museum was still active and popular, hosting some 500,000 visitors just last year, according to the company, but Mercedes-Benz wanted something larger, with the physical capacity to showcase its commercial as well as consumer vehicles.
An international architectural competition was held in 2001, won by the Dutch company UN Studio out of Amsterdam. Details were set by 2003 and then the race towards the opening day deadline began.
Innovative design
The building houses high-tech displays such as large exhibit explanations projected onto white walls to alternate their content and language.
“As the inventors of the automobile, we have always been instrumental in shaping its future,” von Pein said during a sneak preview of the museum to North American automotive media. “With this in mind, we also want to build a bridge with the new museum — a bridge from the past via the present to the future.”
To produce a unique structure that could hold the firm’s large commercial vehicles on any of its nine floors, special structural reinforcements were needed, and the construction and design of the building had to be completed in a tight three-year time frame, said project manager Hugo Daiber. “We have generated more than 35,000 plans on this,” he said. “On account of the shortage of time, we had to plan and build at the same time.”
Complicating matters was the building’s unique trefoil structure, a cloverleaf-like look that intentionally suggests stacked highway off-ramps, with a triangular atrium down the middle that floods the space with natural light. The only straight forms of concrete in the entire complex are the elevator shafts, so traditional building techniques and processes simply didn’t work. “Like so many other things, even the software for generating the surfaces had to be developed parallel to construction activities,” Daiber said.
Not even the railings could be positioned correctly using regular blueprints. The fitters used the architect’s three-dimensional data models.
Adding to the complexity, these curved concrete surfaces had to incorporate room for 630km of hidden alarm, lighting, audio and data cabling. Think Stuttgart, Germany to Paris, France, in wiring, or in Canadian terms, Toronto to Montreal. Even the fire protection system is unique, with a vortex smoke removal system which creates a mini-tornado to channel smoke up and away from the museum’s precious artifacts. The system is the first of its kind in the world, according to Mercedes, and it has applied for recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records.
“A few years ago, coping with the data complexity arising from the geometry would not have been possible within such a short space of time,” Daiber said. “The performance of the software programs available and computer capacity for architecture and construction would simply have been insufficient.”
Taking the tour
The stroll back in time provided by the museum begins at the entrance. Ascending one of the three elevators, three-second moving images from different eras appear on the opposite wall, complete with an accompanying soundtrack. At the top one hears a horse’s clacking hooves. This aural narrative is part of the ninth floor’s effort to take you back to the late 19th century, to a time before automobiles, reminding visitors not only of what the main form of transportation was back then, but how different society was as well. At the entrance of the first display area lies a photo montage of a man dismounting a horse, something the automobile would soon replace.
This first room includes displays from the world’s first-ever automobile, Karl Benz’s patented three-wheeled Motorwagen, from Jan. 29, 1886. Engineer Gottlieb Daimler had invented the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine three years prior to that, and managed to attach it to a carriage in 1886, as well as to bicycles, boats and extended carriage carts, soon to become known as trucks.
From this floor the museum descends in a double helix design, with one path to the bottom organized chronologically by automotive eras, the other by themes (celebrity cars, helping-hand vehicles, commercial vehicles and more), each path crisscrossing on every floor. Audio commentary headphones for either path are available in eight languages, while a child-friendly audio tour is also available in English and German. These are no ordinary history lessons on tape: they are high-tech touch-sensitive interactive devices embedded with sensors that detect various displays and areas throughout the museum, changing the prompts for information that can be requested by the visitor, as well as inserting narration — and silence — for dramatic effect at alternating times.
The museum is the architectural and historical highlight of the site, but there are other new structures that make up what the company calls Mercedes-Benz World. This includes a similarly postmodern steel and glass structure that houses a massive three-floor Mercedes-Benz retailer that displays all 130 models the company manufactures.
Many auto brands have a museum of their works, and all are worthy expositions. But the Mercedes-Benz museum is not only an architectural marvel, but also the only one conceived and designed from the ground up to showcase the full history of the origins of the automobile itself. In short, to provide a unique understanding of the current motorized world even to those thoroughly uninterested in cars in general. It uses the future to shed light on the past.
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