The museum is set as a freestanding object in the city’s landscape. In keeping with its public significance, the building projects above the tops of the existing trees. The vertically structured object contributes to the symbolic presence of the museum.
Not only can the building be seen from a distance, it also serves museum visitors as a vantage point. Designed as an ‘aid of perception’ the museum creates visual correlations with both the history of the location and the history of Mercedes-Benz. From inside the exhibition, views are provided of Bad Cannstatt, the factory premises, The Gottlieb Daimler Stadium, the test track, and the memorial chapel on the Württemberg.
The museum outlines the history of Mercedes-Benz. This history has to be narrated, which means that space has to be created where people can be transported to a different place, into a world where secret scenes or stages can be conjured up, where exhibits, data, and knowledge spark up dreams.
We are talking of architecture as a narrative vehicle, as a book or a system of texts serving as a structural order, of a museum visit as the process of reading things being said and not being said on winding paths, drifting through pages, occasionally sensing between the lines, setting out on flights of the imagination and indulging in meditation, with in-depth insights or in fleeting dances.
The project creates a reservoir of shapes which wait for visitors and readers to be traversed; space that permits a multitude of meanings as a framework for narration.