“Car Experience” is a project for a building to be dedicated to the automobile: the car as an object of desire, a world to explore, a technology to study, an article to display and a means to travel around the building.
Here the world of the automobile intersects with the human and organic world creating a new tectonic structure with methods differing from the usual flat open spaces, square, all on a human scale. Here everything is geared to the automobile – the car is the point of reference.
One will not find stairs to different floors, walls and elevators, but ramps which wind sinuously upwards creating a fluid conception of space, and where the flux of cars can move freely and reach the different levels of the edifice.
On an overall scale the area tectonically resembles a road, with a structure similar to that of an elevated motorway or a car park, but on a more human scale, the structure is as complex, ergonomic and sophisticated as the interior of a car.
The principal structure of the building is a spiral ramp with a glass partition dividing the exterior from the interior. In the internal part, reserved for pedestrians, the incline is more gradual, whereas the exterior and steeper side is for the transit of cars.
The building’s typology develops sequentially, its structure similar to that of a film where the undisputed protagonist is the automobile. In fact the visitor, as the spectator of a film, is obliged, frame by frame, to follow the physical and psychological route as dictated by the museum’s architect.
The visitor enters the museum with his own car and initiates the exhibition’s journey as on a safari, going up the external spiral and experiencing a rather “extreme” sensation – as the ramp consists of rapid ascents and descents which create an undulating, uneven surface facilitating the exhibition of cars from different angles and enabling the visitor to observe them from either above or below.
The route through the museum for the visitor who arrives by car will thus start at ground level and will ascend via the spiral ramp to the top of the building. Here he can park his car and enter into the museum on foot following the exhibition’s descent to the ground level via the more gradual spiral. He can then take an elevator to return to the top of the building to collect his car; should he have arrived in a car with a driver who is awaiting him at the short-term car park at ground level, he can go there directly from below and leave from there.
