Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility. The depot is located next to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Museumpark in Rotterdam. Visitors can see the result of 174 years of collecting. More than 154,000 objects housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates. Next to the objects, all the activities that go into preserving and managing a collection are on open view in the building.
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is the first art storage facility in the world that offers access to a museum’s complete collection. The Depot has a different dynamic to that of the museum: there are no exhibitions, but you can wander through the building, surrounded by 154,000 artworks, alone or with a guide, and get behind-the-scenes glimpses of – among other things – conservation and restoration.
