Interventions in the Rijksmuseum: the reinvention of the museum

The interventions within the Rijksmuseum offer us an opportunity to raise new concepts linked to museum-related functions and its relationship with the city. The Rijksmuseum museum was born with a series of conditions that have forced the building to be used under two superimposed premises: its form and museum-sort typology and its unique condition as a symbolic gate connecting the centre and south of the city via this passageway. These two superimposed premises have been key in its interventions, revealing disparate situations throughout history, turning it into an unfinished project. These functions - as a museum and as an infrastructure of connection - are linked and intertwined, therefore affecting the nearby spaces of the museum and its relationship with the city. The analysis of the interventions carried out till now - including the last one by the architects Cruz y Ortiz - unveil a new set of functions associated to the museum, creating a heterotopia by means of a series of constellations that correspond to a cultural and leisure-kind-of-space, that broadens the museum's function and project's the day to day life of the city distinguishing it from those particular spaces of the museum itself.