In the workplace of Dutch architects MVRDV, inspiration frequently comes around lunch. It's the one time of day when everyone puts down their phones and gathers around a big communal dining table, which is laden with varied salads, to eat and converse.

The dinnerware would prove to be more motivating than ever one fateful day in 2013, during a lunchtime brainstorming session. After eight years, a 40-meter-high Ikea salad bowl, the €3.99 Blanda Blank, has been added to the Rotterdam skyline.

"I was looking for something round," Winy Maas, the witty frontman of MVRDV, recalls of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen's beginnings. This €94 million (£80 million) open archive for the city's art museum currently stands in Rotterdam's Museumpark as a huge mirrored bowl, reflecting the surroundings in a bizarre vista.

Maas remembers the interns placing a large rectangular piece of Styrofoam on the site model. "It was impolite." I replaced it with a mug because I believed something circular would be better to our neighbors. Then, in order to lessen our carbon footprint, I picked the stainless steel bowl, which has a wonderful reflecting effect. That was the end of it."

In a workplace built on whimsy, this is how the design process works. Maas enjoys flipping models on their heads or grabbing everything he can get his hands on and throwing it into the mix. One creation started as a jumble of blocks before he wrapped a cloth over it and transformed it into a bumpy hill.

A model of a grid of small towers was erroneously put horizontally on the table, resulting in a skyscraper with house-sized blocks dramatically cantilevered from its side. The practice's eccentric Superdutch brand is built on the humorous procedure, and it's crucial to their worldwide exportability. (A specific press conference in Chinese was organized for the Depot launch.) Their work crosses cultural borders as architectural slapstick.

Maas believes that Rotterdam is especially well-suited to such unusual form-making. He claims, "It is not a city with regular urbanism."

It was leveled during WWII, and bizarre experiments ranging from rotational cube-houses on stilts to MVRDV's own elephantine market hall have been carried out in the decades following (another result of a model being turned upside down). "It's all about making things." Every generation leaves its imprint on the world, and the next responds."

It was a rocky voyage for this specific mark. The Depot project was initially won by MVRDV in 2007, with a design that resembled another Ikea classic, the Lack table. It was supposed to be a massive square platform on 35m-high legs, with cranes moving containers up and down in a vertical dance of storage, but even Rotterdam thought it was too much. MVRDV won a second competition in 2014, but were later disqualified when it was discovered that Maas had met Sjarel Ex, the co-director of the Boijmans, during the process.

The architects appealed the decision, saying that they had been given an unfair advantage, and were eventually restored. The design was met with a storm of criticism from neighbors – the director of the adjoining Kunsthal worried it would be the park's "cannibal" – but the city approved it and has dutifully put it on the cover of its tourist map as the next star attraction.

This supersized salad dish has already shown to be an enticing selfie magnet in the era of Instagram. Rotterdammers flocked in droves to picture themselves reflected in the Depot's expanding skin on the stormy opening weekend, with chilly gusts howling over its sleek sides.

The plan was to construct something similar to Anish Kapoor's mirrored bean sculpture in Chicago, but the cost of wrapping the Depot in seamless, polished steel was prohibitive, therefore mirror-coated glass panels were selected instead. It gives the idea that the skyline is crushed in a ball from afar, but when you go near, it seems more like a low-budget hall of mirrors.

The distorted surfaces of the Chinese-made panels are clipped on to the concrete bowl in a widely spaced grid, giving it the appearance of a pound-shop Kapoor — one that comes with a €50,000 yearly window cleaning cost.

According to the architects, the goal was to construct a structure that "seems to disappear into its surroundings," yet a 13-story high mirrorball achieves just that, as the Erasmus hospital across the street has long feared. The hospital was adamantly opposed to the initiative, and it has since had to install a screen to keep youngsters in the mental unit from being too stimulated visually. Maas claims that a row of newly planted trees will assist shortly, but this dazzling ark is hardly the best neighbor for anybody who wants to keep their sanity.

Visitors are free to walk the six levels of the huge bowl once inside, with their €20 ticket in hand, where some of the 151,000 artifacts in the Boijmans collection are visible via windows in the strong concrete walls. You may see racks of ancient masterpieces, containers of Memphis furniture, and conservators examining stacks of Yayoi Kusama's red-spotted phalluses.

The artifacts were formerly spread over seven separate locations, including the museum's flood-prone basement, so this is a significant improvement in terms of the €8 billion collection's security.

The structure is capped with a rooftop garden to compensate for the loss of park. When you get to the top, the promised forest turns out to be a ring of trees around the perimeter, with a restaurant and rentable party area taking up the most of the roof. Thankfully, the trees are doing better than those on MVRDV's doomed Marble Arch Mound, which were cultivated in a nursery with their roots entwined for wind stability.

The darkly lighted atrium below provides the feel of a Bond villain's mineshaft lair, with crisscrossing stairs leaping their way up. The dizzying area is lined with large glass vitrines displaying collection pieces, allowing visitors to glimpse the backsides of paintings and the undersides of sculptures.

Views inside the shops reveal unexpected juxtapositions – a pair of mating dwarfs next to a telephone, for example – since the objects are organized by material and size than than chronological order. Although there are no labels or descriptions ("This is not a museum," I was informed), visitors may download an app and scan QR codes to learn more about the pieces.

You may also wear a protective white coat and sign up for a tour, which takes you inside one of the 14 storage rooms, where a guide will bring out a single allocated rack and explain the conservation processes. But don't expect to see a Rothko or a Bruegel — the collection's stars are much too valuable to be moved.

Such is the reality of storing delicate art. Although it is a noble goal to bring the back-of-house world to the public eye – a notion that the V&A is pursuing with its Olympic Park Storehouse in London – the fact is that you don't get to see much. The private art collections of firms such as Rabobank and the KPN phone network, who acquired a collection of Dutch modern art in the 1980s as part of their corporate social responsibility initiative, are housed in the most accessible areas of the building. A freeport is also located here, where merchants may keep art without paying taxes.

Such commercial features, as well as €42 million collected from private sources, have helped to make the project work, but the high ticket price appears at odds with so much of the building being a corporate display to burnish huge brands.

There's also the issue of whether a circular bowl is well-suited to the purpose of storing art. The curving geometry generates a beautiful fan-shape of racks in the main semi-circular painting shop, but in other wedge-shaped rooms, the racks are forced to taper into unusable triangular corners or fit around columns.

The storage has been pushed to match the building's eccentricities, rather than the other way around, which seems to be an unusual approach to construct an art shop.

"It's not dysfunctional," says Ina Klaassen, a co-director at Boijmans, "but it was a challenge." Of course, a rectangular structure would be simpler, but this is so much more enjoyable. "We were looking for something iconic."

The museum's Achilles heel is this. It is now undergoing a €260 million makeover of its elegant 1930s edifice, directed by icon-makers Mecanoo, whose wiggly shaped proposal includes the €17 million demolition of a whole (award-winning) wing that was just erected in 2003. Robbrecht and Daem, the museum's architects, are trying to save it from being demolished, and it's difficult not to see the idea as an act of staggeringly wasteful vandalism, especially considering the climate crisis.

Whatever the conclusion, the museum will have the ultimate supersized selfie mirror to admire its new curves when it reopens in 2028.

Thanks to Oliver Wainwright at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.