Grand reopening of the Rijksmuseum
After a decade of delays, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has finally reopened. Kevin Kwong talks to the museum's director about getting over the finishing line
The general-director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Wim Pijbes, can relate to the headaches afflicting the mammoth West Kowloon Cultural District project. Progress at a snail's pace and spending that looks set to wildly overshoot the budget are familiar territory for Pijbes.
The national museum of the Netherlands reopened with great fanfare on Saturday after extensive rebuilding, renovation and restoration. But the €375 million (HK$3.8 billion) makeover had been beset with delays and funding hurdles, and took a decade to complete.
The plan was conceived in 1999 as a millennium project, which included refurbishing the museum's 19th-century main building and building of a new Asian Pavilion. Construction, however, did not begin until 2003. "You hoped by 2006 it'd be ready; it was too optimistic so it would be 2008," recalls Pijbes. "But then all kinds of problems nobody had ever foreseen showed up, so 2008 would [become] 2010. Just before I started [ in 2008], it was decided 2013 would be the … date to reopen."
Pijbes, who previously ran the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, is visibly relieved to be able to sign off on the transformation.
So he sympathises with administrators of the 15-venue West Kowloon hub, where costs for the first site to come on stream, the Xiqu Centre, are predicted to double from the original estimate of HK$2.7 billion. "These are complicated projects. The renovation of our museum has taken 10 years. So I can imagine that in the energy, and the whole turmoil of a big city that is moving and changing, to have something cultural … takes time. You have to make more than a thousand decisions before you can even start."
Like West Kowloon, part of the new Rijksmuseum involved underground construction: a two-storey basement section was built to house all its energy equipment.