Antwerp's Museum at the River

There has been lots of warm, friendly buzz about Antwerp's new high-rise museum in the harbor district: MAS, Museum aan de Strom.  Check out Roman Hollenstein's excellent piece in the NZZ, available here in English translation:  http://www.signandsight.com/service/1284.html

The building is a  marvel and a delight, rising 60 meters high in a wide open area of docks and water.  It stands all alone; it has no need to integrate itself into an urban context, instead it allows visitors the opportunity to enjoy increasingly higher panoramas of the historic city and the industrial harbor. 

Each floor has a serpentine glass wall facing out into a different direction.  The floor are layered on top of each other in 90 degree turns, like a disheveled pile of books.  The red sandstone sets the building off from the rest of the city while also keeping a rough natural feel of quarried rock.  The stone has a raw, tactile feel even as it so obviously suggests a desert environment far removed from northern Europe. 

The architectural firm of Neutelings and Riedijk have raised a number of buildings through the Netherlands and Belgium that look like viewing platforms, and soon they will bring their techniques to the new Cincinnati Art Museum, their first project in the United States.  Cincinnati has already an avant-garde art museum designed by Zaha Hadid, which like MAS leads the visitor through a carefully arranged series of stairs, or escalators, so that the building becomes a spectatorial apparatus.  The visitors are guided along an ascending path with turns that provide them carefully chosen views.  In the case of MAS, the eye is allowed to wander across a vast panorama, so that each level is literally an elevation above the previous one.  Wisely, the highest floor faces the historic city center, so that the rising alternative views reach their culmination at a point that allows the viewer to enjoy a birds-eye view much like the historical prints shown in the exhibition.

The exhibitions include a selection of Old Masters lent from the royal art museum, placed in dark rooms with precise lighting. You can get your nose up close to a delicate van Eyck. 

The dark exhibition rooms have the added effect of covering over the fact that the interior spaces of the building have a rough unfinished quality, which at times is presented as "honest" reference to the harbor's business of loading and unloading ships, but at other points has the feel of rushed job when for example  2x 6 beams are thrown up to hold Golden Age masterpieces.  To carry on the harbor metaphors, the MAS feels like a ship on its maiden voyage:  the various collections ranging from the history of Antwerp to Indonesian and African ethnography are not given a meaningful connection.  The themes that are chosen to place them together, such as "Representations of Power"  "Life and Death" have all the credibility of a ninth grade social studies text book.  Added to this are distracting sound tracks in the exhibition spaces.  Why do you need to hear a man playing loud violin music as you are contemplating a gold coin with Alexander the Great's profile from the city's numismatic collection?  The staff throughout the museum were nervous and jumpy, especially as the electricity on several floors would intermittently fail.  All of this will presumably be straightened out: the staff will learn the ropes, the exhibits will receive a coherent structure.  As things stand right now, the museum's presentation of Antwerp's urban history is far too fragmented and jumpy, a far cry from Ghent's magnificent city museum.

Right now, the wonderful building (and the interspersed Old Masters) makes the short trip to the edge of Antwerp a delight, eventually the rest of the museum will be ship shape.