Change of gear: the evolution of motoring is vividly brought to life in this new museum for car giant Mercedes.

Just as the sequential photographs by Eadweard Muybridge heralded a shift of perception, enabling the observer to comprehend moving objects, so UN Studio's Mercedes-Benz Museum opens up a new way of viewing objects in a museum. The new building resembles a camera obscura through which the visitor can study objects, motion, history and space.

The road to this museum for the twenty-first century was remarkably straightforward. Mercedes-Benz wanted to display its historic collection of automobiles on the site where the first motor cars went into industrial production 120 years ago. The German manufacturing giant is virtually synonymous with the history of motorisation and cars have immense mass appeal. The company commissioned UN Studio, well known for its challenging approach to space, which in this case also extends to redefining conventional museum viewing practices.

The outcome is a building which immediately registers as a symbol of mobility and dynamism. Surrounded by motorway junctions, car plants and sports venues, including the sinewy swerve of the Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadium roof, the Mercedes-Benz Museum's towering facade has become the gateway to Stuttgart-Unterturkheim, the birthplace of the automobile. An architecture of shimmering silver panels alternates with obliquely positioned glazing, alluding to the legendary Daimler-Benz Silberpfeile (Silver Arrows) racing cars and associated qualities of speed, streamlining and technological perfection.

For obvious reasons, motor museums tend to be ground-hugging constructions, but here UN Studio ambitiously stack cars on nine levels. Applied loads on each floor are considerable, equivalent to a six lane motorway. Despite this extraordinary technical challenge, the structure is far from conspicuous. Two ramps of entwined double helixes wind up around three concrete cores creating a 42m high atrium at the heart of the building. The geometry of the helix dictates the clover-leaf trefoil plan, prompting obvious comparisons with the sinuous spiral of New York's Guggenheim. Yet from the outside there are few clues as to either the nature of the structure or the complex internal organisation. All that registers are the hexagonal columns directly behind the glazing. Columns are set in an inverted V-shape, as if loosely stitching the building together.

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Progress around the collection begins in the soaring atrium hall, from where custom designed lift cabins shoot up to the top floor. En route, visitors can savour a tableau of motoring glory projected onto the atrium's bare concrete walls and a sound installation that evokes the era of pioneering car inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. Rejecting the linear progression associated with a conventional chronological approach, UN Studio and exhibition designer HG Merz present the visitor with two circuit options. You can either follow the ramps to a succession of nine 'Legend-Rooms', or divert and cross over by means of staircases into the 'Collection-Rooms'. In both cases, the visitor is treated to an experiential journey, not only through time, but also in space and light, adeptly choreographed by UN Studio. The complex geometry of the double helix twists and turns, generating a succession of oblique surfaces. Yet the internal space is enviably pure, uncluttered with partition walls or even suspended ceilings.

With great bravura, Van Berkel and his team channel daylight into the building. As the majority of the exhibits are not UV sensitive, maximum daylight penetration became a design priority. Light reflects off the oblique surfaces giving the concrete a powerful sculptural quality. The play of light and material is almost Japanese, recalling Tadao Ando's austere interiors, but within this formal asceticism UN Studio manage to orchestrate different sorts of experiences. Some spaces, such as the 'Legend-Rooms', are theatrically dimmed, whereas the 'Collection-Rooms' are bathed in the glare of full daylight. Here, little precaution is taken against the effects of intense sunshine other than a pixel imprint on the floor to ceiling windows, their outline following the V-shaped incline of the hexagonal columns.

As you drive (naturally) away from the museum, its folded and fractured nature--so powerful from close-up--gradually gives way to a more uniform impression. It is not just a building, but a geometrical figure with a racing track inside; curved, slanted, oblique, sensual. After Mies van der Rohe and James Stirling, whose creations still define the city, UN Studio have put Stuttgart on the architectural map once again.

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