The Arnhem open-air museum is a special event within the vast natural environment of the Veluwe, a private world where an architectural and cultural past is displayed. Old traditions and building styles manifest themselves as a collection of nostalgic objects in the midst of a romantic woodland setting. The new entrance building is seen as an architectural manipulation of this woodland scenery.

The building providing for the sale of tickets, a cafe, cloakrooms and toilets, museum shop, educational room and offices, seeks to remain anonymous, hidden behind garden walls. The atmosphere of the trees dominates. The organisational element of the building - a glass covered timber and steel canopy - forms a covered outdoor route, a lane that mimics the dappled light of the forest canopy. Off this route you find self-contained rooms that fulfil the various functions, each of these rooms relates to its own specific outdoor, enclosed space. The effect is to distance further the world of the museum from the public access road, to enhance the qualities of a time-forgotten place within. The building as threshold between two atmospheres is revealed more as a construction than a volume, more of an experience intrinsically linked to the forest than to its program, its references are both agrarian and from early industrial buildings that are found embedded deep within the trees.