Stuttgart spiral: currently under construction, a new museum for Mercedes-Benz connects with automobile history.

Just before Christmas 1900, a 35 horsepower automobile made by Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft was delivered to Emil Jellinek, a wealthy Austrian businessman who raced cars as a hobby. Named after his daughter Mercedes, it caused quite a stir, with its pressed-steel frame, high-performance engine and honeycomb radiator. Over a century later, the company started by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz is now a towering global enterprise (merging with American giant Chrysler in 1998) and Mercedes one of the world's most famous car brands.

For the car maker that can lay claim to producing the first modern automobile, a sense of history is important. Since 1923, the Mercedes-Benz museum, with its collections of historic vehicles, racing cars and current models, has been a significant aspect of the company's activities. Attracting around 480 000 visitors annually it is, remarkably, the most popular museum in Stuttgart. The expanding collection and increasing visitor numbers put pressure on and eventually outgrew the original 1920s building, so in 2001 Daimler-Chrysler held a limited competion for the design of a new museum, won by Amsterdam-based UN Studio. The 25 000sqm project is now under construction and due to be completed in 2006.

The site lies next to the existing Daimler-Chrysler Unterturkheim plant on the edge of the Neckar river in Stuttgart's industrial northwest. The nomenclature of the surrounding streets (Mercedesstrasse, Benzstrasse, even a Gottlieb Daimler Stadion) decisively stakes out the territory. As the programme celebrates the kinetic allure of the automobile, the choice of architect seems especially germane, given UN-Studio's ongoing preoccupation with Moebius strips, new geometries and continuous, flowing space. And though the exhibits are static, building geometry and internal space contrive to express a sense of fluidity and movement, of visitors barrelling down the Mercedes highway of history with the wind in their hair. The building is based on a trefoil-shaped footprint extruded upwards to create a bulbous, quasi-industrial form that echoes the curves of the oil and gas tanks along the river and the loops and swoops of the surrounding road system. The leaves of the trefoil rotate around a central stem-like atrium that brings light into the deep plan. In section, however, things are more dynamic, with two continuous ramps spiralling around each other in a double helix, connecting single- and double-height plateaus of exhibition space. Rather than a fixed, circuitous plod around the building, the aim is to generate a changing and surprising promenade, with shortcuts, through views, enclosed and open spaces, all continuing to add incident and variety to the visitor experience.

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Circulation is from the top downwards, with visitors transported up through the atrium in a bank of lifts to the starting point of the exhibition route on the topmost floor. Museologically, displays are structured around two main themes, the chronological collection of cars and the wider history of Mercedes-Benz, each linked by a spiralling ramp. The two trajectories cross each other continuously, so visitors can change and vary their routes, and cross refer to the displays. At ground level is a children's museum together with shops and a restaurant housed in a large open plan space that connects the new building with the existing vehicle centre.

With a budget of [euro]75 million, the new museum represents a serious investment for Daimler-Chrysler which, like other car manufacturers, is coming to see high profile architecture as an extension of its corporate image and a crafty, subliminal means of attracting discerning new customers. 'Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz', wailed Janis Joplin plaintively in the late '60s. Now she'd be spoilt for choice.

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