Urban Storage: A Hybrid Museum That Turns Its Archive into the Main Public Space

Most museums show only a fraction of what they own. The rest sits in climate-controlled basements, catalogued and largely unseen. Urban Storage, Hybrid Museum starts from that imbalance and reverses it. Instead of hiding the depot behind the gallery, it makes the depot the building. Storage stops being a back-of-house problem and becomes the spatial framework visitors move through, the thing they come to see.

Designed by Benno Schmitz, the project responds to a moment when collections are growing quickly and digitalisation is changing how people expect to reach knowledge. Visitors want personalised, participatory encounters. Researchers want direct and flexible access to artefacts. Institutions face the logistics of ever-expanding holdings. Schmitz's answer is a hybrid typology that merges archive, exhibition, research and public life into a single organism set within a dense urban site close to public transport.

Shelving Walls as Gallery Walls

The opening rendering puts the thesis plainly. Visitors gather on a gridded floor in front of white shelving walls lined with sculptures and vessels, and the glazed end of the hall opens onto trees beyond. Nothing here is mounted on a plinth or isolated under a spotlight. The objects sit where they are stored, and the storage system itself does the curatorial work of order and display.

This is where the project's guiding equation, Storage + Temple = Experience, becomes spatial. The shelving supplies the efficiency of a depot. The scale of the hall and its calm repetition supply something closer to a civic interior. The experience comes from standing between the two: an archive that has been given the dignity of a public room.

A Programme Weighted Toward the Collection

The drawing sheet pairs two floor plans, an exploded axonometric of stacked levels and a longitudinal section with a bar chart that states the building's priorities in numbers. Storage takes 68% of the programme in high-density, modular units. Experience spaces, meaning exhibition zones, forums, libraries and interactive environments, take 24%. The public circulation spine, the Welcome Street, takes the remaining 8%.

The ratio is the argument. A conventional museum would invert those proportions or hide the largest share entirely. Here the experience spaces are embedded directly inside the storage matrix rather than set apart from it, so the collection stays visually available wherever a visitor lands. The exploded axonometric shows how the levels stack into a single system instead of a gallery building with an archive bolted underneath.

Rooms That Look Back at the City

Not every space is about objects. One rendering shows a dark slatted room with a rope swing, a seated figure and a wall-wide window framing a rail yard and a brick tower. It is a pause in the sequence, a social zone where the view returns attention to the surrounding infrastructure and to the transport links the site depends on.

That outward glance supports the project's urban ambition. Schmitz positions the museum as an infrastructural connector rather than an isolated landmark, part of daily movement through the city. Externally the building reads as monolithic, robust and calm; internally, moments like this one reveal how much it engages with what lies around it.

A Stepped Void and the Freedom to Wander

The second drawing sheet and the section perspective expose the building's core: a stepped central void cut through the gridded shelving structure, with a spiral stair rising at one side and small figures in pink scattered across the terraces. The east elevation shows the vertically ribbed facade that gives the exterior its infrastructural composure, a quiet skin around a highly active interior.

The void is where the Welcome Street and the Random Path do their work. At ground level the Welcome Street cuts through the building as a permeable interface between city and institution, connecting the programmatic layers visually as visitors pass. Above it, the Random Path abandons the fixed sequence of the traditional museum and lets people build their own routes through the collection. Circulation becomes a process of discovery, and interpretation shifts from the curator to the visitor.

Why This Project Matters

Urban Storage takes on a problem most institutions handle quietly and makes it the generator of form. By weighting the programme toward storage and making that storage navigable, Schmitz proposes a museum that is more honest about what it holds and more generous with access. The proportions in the bar chart are not a technical footnote; they are the design.

The project also offers a credible counter to the idea that digitalisation will empty the museum of purpose. If information can be accessed anywhere, the physical building has to offer what screens cannot: proximity to the real object, the freedom to wander and the presence of other people. A gridded archive, a stepped void and a street running through the middle make a convincing case that the depot could become the most public room in the city.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Benno Schmitz

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Project credits: Urban Storage, Hybrid Museum by Benno Schmitz.