Built: 1973 Designed by: Based on a design by Gerrit Rietveld Renovated: 1999 - Addition by Kisho Kurokawa. Type: Museum Location: Paulus Potterstraat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
A very well laid-out, very well-planned art museum. Remains compact while still being airy. Able to display hundreds of works of art in a limited space while still handling heavy usage with ease. The original building is a rectangular affair with open galleries on four floors anchored around an open staircase and elevator. This ability to look across space to another side of the building and up and down to different floors only serves to enhance the masterful use of limited square footage. After all, the museum has over 500 drawings and paintings in its collection in addition to more than a thousand other artifacts. There are 100 paintings on the first floor, alone. The silver clamshell affair is a recent addition to the museum that opened in 1999 to mark Van Gogh's 200th birthday. This building continues the light, open feeling of the earlier museum, but with elegant, gentle curves instead of wide rectangular blocks. Its facade is titanium and brownish-gray stone, though it hard to tell from the photograph because rain was falling at the time. Access is through an underground tunnel.
