Space Encounters Builds a Sealed, Demountable 18-Metre Cube for a Private Art Collection in Arnhem

Cleantech Park Arnhem is not where you would expect to find a home for contemporary Dutch art. The park is a field of factory halls, logistics sheds and wind turbines, built for production rather than contemplation. Into that setting, Space Encounters has placed Showdepot De Groen: an 18 by 18 by 18 metre cube for Collectie DE.GROEN, the collection of artist and collector duo Marjolein de Groen and Peter Jordaan. It holds more than 450 works, with a focus on Dutch contemporary art and emerging talent, across roughly 1,200 m².

The interesting part is not that a private collection got a building. The architects took the language of the business park seriously, with a steel frame, sandwich panels and warehouse proportions, and pushed it into something deliberately strange. The cube is hermetic and turned inward, and it reads as a vault. It is also built to be dismantled. A building made to protect art for future generations sits on a skeleton designed to come apart, and that tension between permanence and temporariness gives the project its intellectual weight.

A Cube Among the Sheds

Seen from across the park, the depot does not pretend to belong anywhere else. A wind turbine rises behind it, a green skip and brick outbuildings sit in the foreground, and the cube stands among them at a similar scale. The architects say the building echoes the volume and materiality of its neighbours, and the photographs confirm it. This is a warehouse in every literal sense.

What separates it is geometry and discipline. The surrounding halls are long, low and functional, while this one is a perfect cube with almost no visible openings. A low timber-clad wing at its base softens the junction with the ground and gives the composition a human-scale foothold. That move matters, because without it the volume could read as hostile rather than mysterious.

A Hermetic Skin with One Tilted Eye

The cladding is standard sandwich panel, the cheapest and most familiar envelope in any business park, finished with a reflective, plated-looking skin. On the grid of panels the architects allow themselves very few gestures: red neon lettering along the roof edge, a small ground-floor door, and one square window rotated off the grid.

That tilted window does a lot of work. A plain square opening would have made the facade look like a utility shed with a skylight. Rotating it makes the opening read as intentional, even a little uncanny, and suggests that something considered is going on inside. Combined with the freshly planted saplings by VIC Landscapes and the pond in front, the cube appears at dusk as an object placed in a garden rather than a shed parked on a lot.

Thresholds into the Box

Entering is staged with restraint. A paved path leads to a sliding door in the panelled wall, the kind of industrial opening you would find on any distribution centre. Inside, light becomes the main tool for direction. A dark room opens through a single lit doorway into a white space, while a corrugated ceiling panel glows green overhead, a reminder that the envelope is still made of industrial parts.

We like that the project does not try to hide its construction once you are inside. The threshold experience comes from contrast between dark and bright and between compressed and open, not from expensive finishes.

Galleries Built from Neutral Parts

The exhibition spaces follow a material palette that collectors and artists will recognise: concrete floors, white walls and galvanized steel. Freestanding white partitions, track lighting and a metal roll cage sit side by side, so the galleries feel like display rooms and working storage at once. That suits a brief that returns to the basics of collecting, which are acquiring, conserving and exhibiting.

The galvanized mesh partitions in the corridor are the most revealing detail. They are borrowed from storage logistics, and they let you look into spaces that are normally closed. The project calls itself a showdepot, and the mesh is where depot and show meet.

A Skeleton Designed to Come Apart

The steel structure, engineered with Van Rossum Raadgevende Ingenieurs and built by Karbouw, is dry-assembled and demountable. White columns and beams stay visible under a ribbed ceiling, and the stair with its slatted metal balustrade and catwalk reads as equipment rather than decoration. The building is arranged as a succession of spaces with different heights, so climbing through it changes your sense of scale more than a stack of identical floors would.

Demountability is often presented as a sustainability checkbox. Here it carries more meaning. A collection is assembled over a lifetime and outlasts the people who build it, yet the building that houses it admits openly that its own life may be finite. That honesty is rare in museum-like buildings, which usually present themselves as eternal.

A Softer Room for Living with the Work

Against the white galleries and grey steel, the plywood-lined lounge feels almost domestic. Green leather sofas, a long-armed wall lamp, a timber bookshelf and a large framed window onto bare trees make a room for conversation, reading and hosting. It is one of the few places where the cube opens to the outside, and that view feels earned because it is so scarce elsewhere.

This room keeps the building from becoming a pure storage machine. Private collections are social projects as much as archival ones, and the lounge acknowledges that the collectors, visitors and artists need somewhere to sit.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows how small the footprint is compared with the larger buildings and parking to the east, sitting near a river and road. The floor plans show a clear logic: a large open hall on the ground floor, a stair and lift tucked to one side, service rooms gathered in a corner, and upper levels divided by freestanding partitions around an off-centre core. The section is the key drawing, with a zigzag stair running past stacked rooms beside a tall open hall.

The elevations show how sparingly the facade is punctured: one small window here, a large tilted opening there, two entrance canopies and the rooftop lettering. The window details, with layered insulation around a steel tube profile, show how much effort went into making that one rotated opening sit cleanly within a standard panel grid.

Why This Project Matters

Showdepot De Groen shows that the most generic building system in the Netherlands, steel frame and sandwich panel, can carry cultural ambition when it is handled with precision. Space Encounters did not fight the business park. They used its materials and its scale, then shifted proportion, aperture and light just enough to make the result read as a protective, slightly enigmatic vessel for art.

It also offers a useful model for the growing number of private collections that need storage, display and hospitality under one roof without the cost or pretension of a museum. The open question is whether a demountable vault can carry the weight of a legacy. We think the project answers it well: a building does not need to last forever, as long as it is built with enough care that someone will choose to keep it.

Showdepot De Groen by Space Encounters, Arnhem, The Netherlands. Area: 1,200 m². Photography by Lorenzo Zandri.

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