A museum in Rotterdam opens up its collection

THE NEW home for the collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, a gorgeous 40-metre-tall mirrored flowerpot that is set to become Rotterdam’s signature building, had its origins in an extremely Dutch emergency. The basement that held the museum’s undisplayed art—151,000 objects, among the Netherlands’ most important collections—was six metres below sea level, and kept flooding. The city had constructed a garage under an adjacent park which interfered with drainage. Sjarel Ex, the museum’s director, could have built a storage facility in a suburb, but wanted a way to keep the trove on site, and to open it to the public.