Everything’s been made to measure, nothing is standard.
Wout Braber.
From Shell to Ready To Open
Construction has finished, but … you can’t visit the depot yet. Why not? Because, just like a newbuild home, it was handed over as a shell. Now it’s time to work on the interior: from climate control to furnishing and fitting out the conservation workshops. Meanwhile the collection is being prepared for the move. More than 154,000 objects will soon have a new home. What does all this involve and what can visitors expect in the near future? We talk to Wout Braber (Head of Accommodation and Maintenance), Sandra Kisters, (Head of Collections and Research), Sjoerd Voss (Moving into the Depot Project Manager) and Yoeri Meessen (Head of Education and Visitor Information). Four passionate museum specialists with a joint mission: a successful move and opening.
The Building: Furnishing, Fitting Out and Stress Testing
Wout Braber: BAM handed over the depot on 15 May. But the building isn’t ready yet. The concrete certainly needs another few months to dry out. Meanwhile we’re beginning to tune the ventilation systems to ensure that the right quantities of air reach the right places. In September we can start stress testing. This means we’ll simulate emergencies, for example the sudden failure of the heating system. You can expect teething troubles with the building services systems in a new building, and we certainly want to resolve them before we open.
Sandra Kisters: Fitting out and furnishing the depot’s interior will take place in parallel. For instance, thirteen large floating display cases, which will contain artworks, will be installed in the atrium. There’s also work to be done on the foyer, the restaurant, the conservation workshops, the event space and, of course, the depot compartments themselves.
Wout: Furnishing and fitting out is a complicated business. It’s a circular building, but before long, things that are mostly rectangular, like racks and shelving units, will be coming in. Imagine putting a kitchen unit against a semi-circular wall. There would be a lot of unused space. Everything’s been made to measure, nothing is standard.
Sandra: We’re also going to start training the staff who’ll soon be taking artworks into a kind of cherry picker because the depot spaces are 4.5 metres high. There are five climates in the depot. There’s a separate climate for the conservation workshops, while the climatic conditions in the storage zones are geared to artworks made of different materials: metal, organic/inorganic materials, black-and-white photography and colour photography. A maximum of fifteen people will be able to have a guided tour lasting a maximum of eleven minutes inside a compartment, after which the space needs forty-nine minutes for the air conditioning system to recover so that the climate remains stable. This is essential in order to keep the artworks in good condition.
Wout: The pressure in the depot compartments is slightly higher than in the atrium (the open area) to minimize the impact of visitors. We’re expecting 200,000 visitors a year, so everything has to work properly. The entire building will be cleaned before we open. That clean will go much further than in a home. It’ll be more like the stringent requirements that apply to a hospital. There’s a huge amount of glass, for instance; the façade alone has 6,600 square metres of mirrors, which will have to be cleaned four times a year.
The Collection: Ready for Transport
Sandra: Soon we’re going move all our objects, over 154,000 of them, to the new depot. Currently they’re housed in five external temporary storage locations in the Netherlands and Belgium. The preparations are going well. We have three-dimensional measurements of everything so we can be certain that they’ll fit in the depot’s shelving
and racks when they arrive. We’ve also done a lot of conservation work, such as improving the frames of paintings and mounting backing boards, which make paintings more stable for transport to the depot. Every object will have a label bearing a colour code. There’s a different colour for each category of artwork. All glass objects, for instance, will have a pink label. Altogether there are fourteen colours for fourteen types of objects. They correspond to the fourteen compartments in the depot. Each object is packed by hand. We have a lot of experience with that, for example sending artworks to foreign countries. Loans to other museums involve transport over big distances. That makes transport riskier, but it only involves one or at most a couple of works. Moving to the depot only involves a few kilometres, but the volume is on a different scale now that the entire collection is being relocated at one time. Being a museum, we have less experience with such megaprojects. Sjoerd has a great deal of experience with moving large and valuable collections. He has previously managed collection relocations for the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Moving In: A Massive Operation
Sjoerd Voss: The move itself will take three or four months, but the preparation phase is much longer. It’s a major logistics operation in which we try to express everything in terms of time and volumes. In other words, in timelines and cubic metres. Unlike most museum staff, I talk a lot about processes, workflow, escalating etc. A relocation involves more than just moving artworks from one place to another. It’s also important to include all your colleagues in your planning.
Sandra: For art historians like us, that’s a whole different way of thinking. Suddenly you have to stop thinking in terms of the individual artworks, which in many cases are unique objects. You have to aim for standardization and work with a uniform system. That is the heart and soul of the move. Dealing with over 154,000 objects means you simply can’t operate at a micro level. The beneficial side effects of the standardization include having reusable transport frames for almost all artworks. Safety is paramount, but sustainability is an important principle for the packaging material.
Sjoerd: Preparations for the move include providing reusable packaging and transportation materials. They protect the objects from shocks and vibrations, temperature changes and fluctuations in humidity. Lorries will soon be coming to the depot 216 times over a twelve-week period. That means transporting a couple of thousand works a day. Thanks to the colour codes we can get them to where they belong quickly. Soon there’ll be a large team in the depot to take care of moving in. We’ll have twenty-four unpackers, six registrars and three coordinators. Then there are the security people. I won’t be finished with my job until everything’s in the new depot.
Open to the Public
Sandra: After the move, the building will start operating like a traditional depot immediately – a place where artworks are stored under optimal conditions. But at that point it won’t be open to the public. The transport of loans to and fro will be taking place though. Other colleagues, including the education and visitor information department, are getting ready for the opening.
Yoeri Meessen: What will visitors be seeing and experiencing? It will in any event be very different from a visit to a museum. The depot grew out of a desire to share the entire collection with our visitors. In a museum we can never exhibit more than a small selection. In the depot you can discover for yourself the collection we’ve built up over 171 years. As you walk into the depot’s atrium, you’ll be able to see large floating display cases containing all sorts of interesting eye-catchers.
Yoeri: Traditional visitor information will be enhanced with a digital floorplan that’s linked to the day’s programme. It shows where and when certain types of activity and guided tours take place. Visitors can use an app to scan objects and immerse themselves in knowledge, and in the observations of other visitors. The depot app also gives the option of viewing artworks in different ways, for example via augmented reality. It reveals layers that are not visible to the naked eye. As though you’ve got
X-ray vision.
Yoeri: Otherwise the depot is primarily a working building. Here you discover objects’ backstories. For example, what are they made of? How do we look after them and how do we conserve them? So we aren’t putting the spotlight so much on the art history. Instead we’re developing presentations about what’s involved in conserving an artwork, and soon you’ll be able to see conservators at work ‘live’. But the provision of information is not a one-way street. We’re also going to utilize the knowledge and experience of our visitors. After all, they know things about the artworks that a zrt historians don’t. Because it’s something from their own neighbourhood for instance, or because they knew the artist. This way the collection is enriched with unique, personal information.
Sandra: The depot is scheduled to open officially in the autumn of 2021 and then everyone can admire the collection and the building. So please be patient for a little bit longer. We hope that we’ve been able to explain why it’s going to be a while before the depot is really open to the public.
Vlog Series: Behind the Mirrors
We’re making a vlog series to keep everyone up to date with all the work going on behind the façade. In this series Wout Braber takes you on a tour of the depot and in nine episodes you climb from the entrance to the sixth floor. Each video takes a look at one floor and discusses what’s going on there, so you can see how it looks now and what it will look like soon.
Watch the vlogs (in Dutch)
Depot Journal
This article has been published before in Depot Journal #2 which is part of a series of six. If you would like to receive all the printed Depot journals by post, please send an email to info@boijmans.nl with your full name and address, reference ‘receive Depot Journals’.