Antwerp’s MAS museum: making waves

Photograph by Jeroen Verrecht

Nothing quite prepared me for the ‘wow’ factor of the new MAS – Museum aan de Stroom (Musuem on the River) – in Antwerp. I’d seen plenty of photos and thought the stacked-tower design with its contrasting blocks of red sandstone and glass looked great, but the pictures didn’t convey any sense of what it would be like to be inside the 10-storey building.

As you go up the escalator from floor to floor, you feel how every level is twisted 90 degrees to form a giant spiral. Each time you go up a storey, you’re treated to one stunning view after another through the ultra-modern, wavy glass. When you get to the top, there’s a real treat in store: an open-air rooftop with a 360-degree panorama of the surrounding port and the city itself (an experience that can, incidentally, be enjoyed for free without an entrance ticket to the museum). There are even portholes in the glass safety barriers so that you can take the perfect photograph.

The museum has been built in Antwerp’s old harbour area and is supposed to herald a new era of development in this part of the city. I have to admit that before I visited the idea of ‘an area under development’ had made me think I’d be heading to a desolate part of town, probably in the middle of nowhere, where one stunning building would stand all on its own. In fact, the area is just a 10-minute walk from the city’s historic centre and the proximity to the water not only ties in with the maritime theme but also looks and feels good.

But what about the actual exhibits in the museum? All the publicity before the opening in May this year had gone on and on about how the museum would tell the story of Antwerp and its place in the world, but I couldn’t quite grasp what that really meant and what would actually be in the museum. My expectations dropped further when I learned that it would bring together former collections of the Ethnographic Museum, National Shipping Museum and Folklore Museum. I had images of a mish-mash of dull pieces that no longer had homes.

Far from it, it turned out. The sculptures from different religions, the scale models of old sailing ships and the oil paintings of Antwerp have instead all been given a new lease of life in this new environment. The curators have grouped the objects by theme (four themes over five floors) and included audio and video to help bring the exhibits to life and put them in context.  Next to old musical instruments there are buttons to press that make the sound of the bells or the flute you’re looking at; old paintings of Antwerp’s port hang from walls made of wooden crate strips to evoke the port atmosphere; the floor dedicated to the ‘World Port’ theme has the history of the maritime world running on a screen the length of the room; and as you leave the port-themed storey, you are encouraged to write a message and pop it in a bottle.

With a total of 460,000 items on display – and that’s not even taking into account the temporary exhibitions – you’re unlikely to get round the whole museum in one visit, but you can certainly pop your head into each floor and then focus on a couple of the themes in more detail. One downside for non-Dutch speakers is that a lot of the information is only in Dutch, but the introductory boards to each floor are in English as well as the national languages of Belgium. To get a taster, you can take an online tour at http://livetour.mas.be/uk/ . But don’t forget that photos and videos just don’t convey the wow factor. For that, you have to pay a visit in person.