10/04 - Porsche Museum, Stuttgart

We were a bit overwhelmed by the Benz Museum as we took the S-Bahn rushing to Porsche's. We get off almost right in front of Delugan Meissl's new museum. With a building cost of 100 million euros and 35,000 tons of steel, we came to the museum with high expectations. At first glance, I was quite impressed by the boldness of the floating structure and the purity of the white powdered coated aluminium panels. Yet the most impressive of all are the highly-polished stainless steel panels on the underside of the structure, forming a super-reflective surface above us as we entered the building.

However, it was a different story inside. Visitors crowded at the foyer to pay for admission and obtain their audio-guides, not entirely organized when we were there, with large amount of people queuing from various directions. Long escalators brought us up to the exhibition level and found the trendy white interiors forming a uniform backdrop for the sport-cars. With open layout, we had difficulty to find the ideal sequence to see the exhibition. As our primary interest lies in architecture and not automobile, we soon shifted our focus from the 911's to the interior detailing and spatial designs. With no windows to allow natural light to get in, the entire exhibition space feels like an isolated showroom underground, instead of floating in mid-air. In similar fashion of isolating from its context, the exhibition itself does not in any sense provide much information on the context of Porsche. With the large amount of visitors we had experienced that day and the lack of contextual information, the museum failed to provide a clear story of Porsche to someone like us, who have little knowledge about sport-cars and Porsche. Our tour ended in an anti-climax: we walked into a long corridor, found our way through a door that was monitored by a security guard (seems like a design flaw, either the door is not too well sign-posted or it's a bit dangerous for people to use it at the same time from both sides), and then reached two narrow and confusing doors side by side at the end of another corridor - the male and female toilets.

Unlike the experience of many, our visit to the Porsche Museum is a little disappointment.