Nevertheless, work on the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum has taken years longer and cost many more millions than planned.
Willem Sandberg, a graphic designer who curated the Stedelijk from 1937 to 1941 before becoming its director until 1963, sealed its avant garde status by painting the interior walls white and with a series of daring exhibitions.
The venue became quintessentially Dutch, moving away from the stuffiness of museums at the time to create what Sandberg called a place "where you dare talk, kiss, laugh out loud, be yourself, a focus of the life that's lived today."
In a sign of the museum's ambitions to internationalise itself, former Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art senior curator Ann Goldstein was named the Stedelijk's first US and first woman director in 2009.
Presenting the renovation work, she hailed a "unique museum that gets under people's skin, that enters into peoples' lives", vowing to continue the museum's tradition of engaging visitors by "turning confusion into curiosity."
The museum is proud of the controversy it has caused over the years and remains as critical as it is criticised.
This can be seen in the choice of John Knight's "Autotypes, A Work In Situ", housed in the "bathtub" and consisting of dining plates with blueprints of new additions to museums around the world on them, including the bathtub itself.
The Stedelijk says the work reveals "the uniformity of museum architecture... the changing role of the museum, which includes serving as a marketing tool for city branding within the ever-expanding spectacle of mass tourism."
The museum has even had a dig at rising anti-immigrant politics in the usually tolerant Netherlands, with its first temporary exhibition called "Beyond Imagination".
The museum's blog said the show "mirrors the diversity and international character of the highly experimental Dutch art scene, a unique ecosystem at risk due to the current political climate."
While the building's architectural contrasts are obvious from the outside, once visitors are inside the exhibition space the interiors are all the same style and visitors do not know if they are in the old or the new.
"There are people who really hate it, they think it's impossible to put such a white thing next to such a beautiful old building," said architect Crouwel, whose father Wim Crouwel was the museum's most famous graphic designer.
"But I think it's good, you can see in which time which is built and you should always build for the future and not for the past."