The story behind the design of the museum’s new building

’This enlarged drawing marks the first concrete step taken toward the design of the new building—that creative moment when concept first manifested in lines on paper. The originally eight-centimetre-long drawing was sketched onto a scrap already filled with scribbles. Having tossed out a thousand different ideas, an elemental force had suddenly gripped my hand, and heart. It all happened so fast, I hardly knew what hit me. My hand started to move and there arose before me an image I’d never seen before—a force that surged upward, folding space.... I had a design. Later, when my father arrived and saw what I’d drawn, all he said was: ‘There it is: the new Museum!’ We hurried to the workshop, where we grabbed some wood and a section of cloth, which he asked me to secure with four screws so we could see how it looked in three dimensions. For the centrepiece, he sought out an old, rusty, square nut my grandfather had carefully preserved—it must have been at least 120 years old—and set it down to serve as a monument. ‘Now it’s finished!’ he told me. I’ll never forget that moment. There we stood in absolute silence, gazing at the makeshift model, feeling as if the thoughts had simply flown out of our hands and were now walking a path of their own.’
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