"The Museum on the river" or "Museum aan de Stroom" or "MAS" in Antwerp (Belgium)

Last week-end i travelled to Antwerp. Among different things i visited the MAS, an acronym which stands for "Museum aan de Stroom" dutch for "the Museum on the river".
Antwerp ( « Antwerpen » in dutch and « Anvers » in french) is the largest (in population) city in Belgium and the capital of the Antwerp province of Flanders. It is located on the eastern bank of the river Scheldt ( Escaut in french , remember Jacques Brel' s songs !) linked to the North Sea by the Westerschelde estuary and hosts one of the biggest seaports in Europe ( second after Rotterdam in Netherlands) and the seventeenth largest by tonnage in the World .
Since the sixteenth century after the decline of Bruges (because of the silting up of the Zwin), Anvers became the most important city (then part of the Duchy of Brabant) thanks to his port and all the trade and business around it. It became even the sugar capital of Europe, importing product from Portuguese and Spanish plantations. No doubt when you stroll the streets of the old area that it has been a very very wealthy city.
So to commemorate this history, and the tight links between the town and his river the Antwerp's Municipal executive decided in 1998 to build a new museum in the Eilandje district, near the old harbour. The docks there were constructed for Napoleon in 1811, as a base for his planned naval invasion of London, but by the middle of the last century had fallen into disrepair. The whole Het Eilandje area – which includes Antwerp's two oldest docks, Bonaparte and Willem, and a grid of streets stretching between the red light district and the main harbour – has undergone since a few years massive reconstruction . The MAS is part of this urban rénovation. His architecture has been designed by a Rotterdam firm of architects. From the air the MAS looks like a huge red logo bricks construction, from nearer we can see the ten stacked-up boxes (look like containers) of the 10 floors of this 60 meters high tower. We are impressed by the red of these huge boxes ( themselves made with litlier panels of hand cut red indian sand stone (100 x 0,60) from Agra. The architects Willem-Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk have designed a squared-off spiral so that each of the building’s levels offers a sweeping panorama of the city and his river. The floor to ceiling walls of undulating glass give the impression that the huge boxes are cantilevered. This modern architecture is really a success, and here again we can see that belgian people like to mix history and modernity. The museum has been inaugurated and opened in may 2011
Next time perhaps i ‘ll tell you what we can find in these huge red boxes.
One link for the oustanding pictures : http://www.yatzer.com/MAS-Museum-in-Antwerp-by-Neutelings-Riedijk

Hi Jean-Pierre,

Thanks for the report of your visit.

Hi Jean-Pierre !
Thank you very much for letting us know about your trip. it is very interesting...