The new building, worth 79 million euros, is located between the city station, the main shopping street Porschestraße and the Volkswagen plant complex. Nearby there are railway tracks and a shipping canal. Such an environment for future construction should have scared off the architect, but Hadid successfully integrated her museum into the industrial landscape.
The building is raised above the ground on ten twin pillars that resemble inverted cones. They house a museum bookstore, an auditorium with 250 seats, a conference room and an entrance to the museum.
Thus, the bulk of the building is occupied by a single exhibition space; there are no clear divisions between separate areas of knowledge, presented in the form of various installations. Most of them can be launched by any visitor; thus, the organizers of the museum hope, through the direct participation of the audience, to make the laws of physics, the chemical properties of substances and the foundations of biology more understandable for them.
In this exhibition area there is no prescribed order of inspection, and, thanks to the peculiarities of Hadid's architecture, even a person imagining an architectural project and its plan loses orientation there after a few minutes. The ceilings either descend below or form spacious halls; the floor rises and falls; the walls approach each other and part again. But this is presented by the customers as a merit of the building: the spontaneity and naturalness of the transition from one exhibit to another, from one theme to another should contribute to the "assimilation" of the information received. Zaha Hadid describes the interior of the museum as a series of exploding particles.
Particular attention was also paid to the design of the site around the museum. A kind of city square was created there, a connecting link between the station and the Volkswagen plant, where, in addition to production facilities, the Autostadt shopping and entertainment complex is located. Visitors must pass under the museum building, along the path indicated by a bright blue line paved on the asphalt.
