From the air, the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp looks like a stack of red Lego bricks. Large, expensive Lego bricks, dropped by some tired giant child and stuck together with what could conceivably be great swathes of Sellotape. The city's newest museum, designed by the Dutch architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk opened this month and looks more solid but no less fanciful from the ground. The Sellotape is in fact wide panels of undulating glass separating 10 giant stone containers, stacked one on top of the other and clad in violent red Indian sandstone.
It's an idiosyncratic design that contrasts with the city's predominant architectural styles the traditional Flemish ziggurat roofs of the pretty historic centre and the port's brutalist industrial sprawl. But this is exactly the point: Museum aan de Stroom (which is known as MAS and translates as Museum by the River) is intended to be a bridge between the city centre and the port.
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