Museum de Fundatie

The museum occupies the former Paleis van Justitie in Zwolle, a neoclassical building of 1841, and in 2013 Bierman Henket added the thing everyone photographs: an ellipsoid volume of about a thousand square metres set on the roof, clad in some fifty-five thousand three-dimensional white tiles that catch the light differently through the day, doubling the exhibition space and giving the building a top-lit gallery with views over the city through slots at either end. Zwolle calls it the wolk, the cloud, or less kindly the egg, and opinion in the town has never entirely settled. The collection comes from the Hannema-de Stuers foundation and covers a wide range - old masters including Bruegel and Van Goyen, French nineteenth-century work, Mondrian, Van Gogh drawings, Warhol and contemporary Dutch art - with a second site at Heino in a country house.

History

The museum was founded in 1958 at Kasteel Het Nijenhuis near Heino, the home of its founder Dirk Hannema, a former director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. From 1991 to 2005 it also used the Bergkerk in Deventer, and since 2005 it has occupied the former court building on the Blijmarkt in Zwolle; in 2015 it had a record 310,000 visitors (Wikipedia, Museum de Fundatie).

What's there

• An ellipsoid on a roof - fifty-five thousand white tiles over an 1841 courthouse.
• A top-lit upper gallery - the new volume with views through slots at each end.
• A wide-ranging collection - Bruegel and Van Goyen through to Warhol.
• A divided town - the cloud admired and disliked in roughly equal measure.

When to go

All year. Half a day.

Things to know

Closed Mondays. The permanent collection rotates and much of the space goes to temporary exhibitions. The second site at Heino is a separate trip and ticket.

Nearby

Zwolle's moat circuit and the Sassenpoort are a short walk.

Key facts