GAD Editorial · Published · · English study · Chinese summary · Study dated 2026-10-09
Delugan Meissl Associated Architects is often encountered first through a striking outline. A more informative reading follows the visitor from the surrounding city into a shared interior and onward to an exhibition or auditorium. Founded in Vienna in 1993 by Elke Delugan-Meissl and Roman Delugan, DMAA has been led with Dietmar Feistel and Martin Josst since 2004. Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart show how the practice gives movement a role in making those memorable forms usable.
Eye opened its Amsterdam building in 2012 on the northern bank of the IJ. The museum’s own architectural account describes a sequence of open and enclosed spaces whose character changes with the route and daylight. Its central Arena includes a restaurant and views across the water. Broad steps provide places to sit as well as a route upward, bringing the everyday activity of gathering into the middle of a film institution.
The route to the screening rooms changes that relationship. As visitors move away from the Arena, the outside view and the sound of the café recede. Eye describes this as a gradual preparation for cinema. The building therefore organises a transition between two forms of spectatorship: looking at the city across the water and concentrating on a film in an enclosed room. This sequence is a more precise subject for analysis than resemblance to a bird or another sculptural image.
The Porsche Museum, opened in January 2009, uses a stronger separation between lower entrance accommodation and the principal exhibition volume. Porsche’s architectural record describes a large upper body supported by three V-shaped columns. Below it, the base contains the foyer and a group of visitor and institutional functions, including the workshop, archive and shop. An escalator carries visitors upward into the exhibition. The apparent suspension of the upper mass is thus tied to a clear change in programme and level.
A visitor encounters the museum before reaching its displays. The open space beneath the raised body makes the underside part of the arrival experience, while the ascent changes the viewpoint and separates the street-level setting from the exhibition above. Our reading is that the dramatic form gains coherence from this sequence. It is not only an object to be photographed; it establishes a relationship between approach, threshold and destination.
The two museums use movement differently. Eye gathers visitors around a shared interior from which several cultural experiences can begin. Porsche makes ascent into a raised volume a defining event. Both suggest that a strong external identity needs an equally clear account of how people enter, pause, orient themselves and leave. A photograph can establish recognition, but it cannot establish the quality of that entire journey.
For designers, DMAA’s work offers a useful prompt to test bold geometry against an ordinary visit. The route should be studied with changes in light, sound and level, alongside accessible alternatives and the practical requirements of crowd movement. A generous shared space must also work when people are waiting, dining or arriving simultaneously. The architectural opportunity is to make these conditions contribute to the experience, so that formal intensity is supported by a comprehensible and inhabitable sequence.