The renewed Museum Arnhem opens today

Museum Arnhem has been closed for more than four years for renovation, today it opens its doors to the public again. The most prominent renewal is the west wing, designed by the architectural firm  Benthem Crouwel Architekten. The colossus, which hangs fifteen meters over the moraine, with 82,000 ceramic tiles from ice blue to earth tones, stands out from both the Utrechtseweg and the Rijnoever.

The old building, which dates from 1872, has also been thoroughly overhauled by the architect. The central dome now houses Café Pierre, named after former director Pierre Janssen, which, like the museum shop and the sculpture garden, is accessible without a ticket.

New exhibition spaces have been accommodated in the new wing of the museum. From the wing you can see a beautiful view over Arnhem and the floodplain landscape. The design also includes a thorough renovation and renewal of the current building; originally a gentlemen's club from 1873 and later used as a museum.

Construction
Pieters designed the construction for the adjustments in the existing and for the new construction. The client has requested a flexible, divisible building. Pieters designed a supporting structure with load-bearing trusses in the facades so that no intermediate columns are needed and the large cantilever on the Rhine side could be made. The new building stands next to a steep slope and on the other side connects to the existing museum, which is founded on steel. The new building is founded on a pile-slab foundation with soil-displacing screw-injection piles, so that no damage is caused to the existing building and the moraine.

To create the large cantilever in the new building, 2 steel truss structures have been designed to support the hollow-core slab floor. At the location of the cantilever, the roof is made of light steel to limit the load on the trusses. In the rest of the building, the roof is made of hollow-core slabs to accumulate heat and cold.