Museum aan de Stroom

The Museum aan de Stroom ( German: " Museum on the river" ), short- MAS, is a museum located in the Flemish port city on the Scheldt Antwerp, which was opened in May 2011. In MAS, among others, the collections of the " Etnografisch Museum ", the " National Maritime Museum ", the " folk museum " and parts of the collections of the " Museum Vleeshuis " have been merged. Overall, the fundus of the collection contains more than 470,000 objects.

Formation

As early as 1998 the city decided Antwerp, a new museum building in the former harbor area of ​​Antwerp, to build the " Eilandje ", which should devote themselves thematically town, the port of Antwerp and the shipping industry. In 1999 an international architectural competition was announced. Among the 55 participants in the design of the architect Willem January Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk ( Neutelings Riedijk Architects, Rotterdam) was the winner. The foundation stone was laid in 2006. Upon completion of construction, the MAS was officially opened by the Belgian royal couple on May 17, 2011.

Architecture

The exhibition rooms of the 62 -meter-high museum tower are over ten floors in containers or "boxes" stacked. Each layer is rotated 90 degrees, so that there is a helical arrangement. The intervening galleries with wavy glass surfaces allow changing views of city and harbor. The facade of the Museum of reddish Indian sandstone is decorated with 3000 hands in polished aluminum, an allusion to the origin of the name of the city of Antwerp. In the meantime entered jumps on to the produced by the Italian company Sun Glass corrugated glass surfaces. Several elements had to be replaced and specialists from the University of Ghent 's mandate was to investigate the cause of the problem.