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"View Slideshow\n\nThe sky is a typical Stuttgart-in-winter gray\u2014until, suddenly and miraculously, a rainbow emerges above the white rhombus of the new Porsche Museum: a symbol, perhaps, of the romance that pervades the businesslike culture of this legendary German marque.\n\nIt makes sense that a museum celebrating the brand and its contributions to the automotive world would combine technological virtuosity with cutting-edge design. The new, $150million structure, designed by the Viennese firm Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, is expected to draw 200,000 visitors a year. It sits in the center of Stuttgart's Zuffenhausen district, where the carmaker's design department has been headquartered for more than 60 years. Via the adjacent Porsche Plaza, visitors enter under a brightly polished metal ceiling. The effect is ethereal, like boarding a spaceship from beneath. From here, one passes a glass-walled workshop, where any number of cars are being restored and repaired; farther on are the archives, which contain thousands of historical documents and two and a half million images.\n\nEscalators carry guests to the top of the museum, where one pathway leads back to the period 1900\u20131948, which began with Ferdinand Porsche's earliest gasoline-electric hybrids and ended with the first cars to bear the Porsche name. Another pathway chronicles the history of the marque, featuring the most famous race cars and sports cars from the company's inception right up to the present.\n\nDelugan Meissl Associated Architects won out among 107 competitors for the job, thanks to a powerful vision of a building floating above the plaza. Principal architect Roman Delugan shares a sketch of that original vision: a scrawled image of that hovering, UFO-like shape joined to the ground by a fragile gangplank. In conversation, Delugan frequently refers to \"the physiology of space.\" Martin Josst, the partner from Delugan Meissl who oversaw construction on the project, elaborates: It's the way spaces convey feelings\u2014of motion or rest, of speed or calm.\n\nThat fundamental notion dictated the museum's interior arrangement, Josst explains. \"There are sometimes long walls and distance to suggest speed, as in a racing straightaway,\" he says. Narrowing passages impel forward motion, while \"plazas\" of cars on platforms inspire rest and contemplation.\n\nThe cars are displayed against expanses of white, some sitting on little islands of green glass. The islands represent ideas that are central to Porsche's ethos: the concept of speed, or of lightness, for instance. The idea of consistency is illustrated by a series of overlaid silhouettes of the iconic 911, whose shape evolves yet seems never to change.\n\n\"This is a rolling museum,\" says Klaus Bischof, head of Porsche's Museum on Wheels, the division that culls cars from the exhibited selection for races and shows. The 550-A Spyder on display when the museum opened, for instance, ran in this year's Mille Miglia in Italy. An exploded view of a special 12-cylinder racing engine invites viewers to walk around the component parts to see how they fit together.\n\nDelugan declares, \"We did not feel the need to create just a sculpture.\" He recalls that the form of the building came to him in something like a dream. One morning, after pondering the project for some time, he simply woke up with a sudden vision of how it should look. \"We wanted to elevate the museum,\" he says, \"the way Porsche elevated the automobile.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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