In 1998 the city of Antwerp decided that its maritime museum, its folklore museum and its ethnographic collections should move under one roof, on Hanzestedenplaats on the Eilandje. An architecture competition followed in 1999. In 2000 the Dutch practice Neutelings Riedijk won it with a design called Het Stapelhuis, the stacking warehouse. The first stone went down in September 2006, the building reached its full height on 2 October 2008, and the Museum aan de Stroom, or MAS, opened to the public on 17 May 2011. Its first exhibition was called Masterpieces in the MAS, five centuries of images in Antwerp. The building cost €56 million, and it was the first new museum Antwerp had built in a century.

A Hanseatic address

The address is older than the museum. The site sits between the Willemdok and the Bonapartedok, two of the oldest docks in the city, and for three centuries it held the Oostershuis, the house of the Easterners. The Hanseatic League built it in the 1560s as its regional headquarters and warehouse, to a design by Cornelis Floris, the architect of the town hall. It had five floors and measured 80 metres by 60, which made it one of the largest buildings in Antwerp. The Hanse merchants left after the city fell to the Spanish in 1585. The building served afterwards as a barracks and a hospital, among other things, until a fire destroyed it in 1893.

By the time the city chose the site, it held an old, run-down warehouse. Neutelings Riedijk took the warehouse as their model: the tower stacks its rooms the way the 19th-century warehouses of the Eilandje stacked goods.

Ten boxes, a quarter turn each

The tower is 60 metres tall: ten floors of windowless exhibition rooms, each turned a quarter on the one below, so that a glass boulevard of escalators spirals up around them. “It’s a sort of warehouse for history, a stacking of ten big treasury boxes,” the architect Willem Jan Neutelings said when it opened. The boxes are clad in deep red sandstone from Agra, in northern India. Fixed to the stone are 3,185 aluminium hands, the city’s symbol since Brabo cut off the giant’s hand and threw it into the Scheldt.

Inside, the boulevard carries the same number of medallions, 3,185, designed by Tom Hautekiet with texts by the writer Tom Lanoye and based on the plan of Palmanova, the star-shaped Renaissance ideal town in northern Italy. The walls are lined with birch plywood, another box within the box. Neutelings called the hands and medallions “contemporary ornaments”. The interior installations were by B-architecten, and the boulevard came with a musical score by Eric Sleichim of the ensemble Bl!ndman.

He built the visit as a contrast. The exhibition rooms have no daylight; the boulevard is not air-conditioned, “so it’s like you’re still outside”. Of the rooms he said: “It gives this effect of the past, of death, and when you come out of the box again you are in the light.” The curved panes of glass bend the skyline as you climb, and the Cathedral of Our Lady turns up in them more than once. “Sometimes you can see the cathedral twice,” he said.

A skull on the square

The square in front of the tower is a work of art in its own right. The city asked the Antwerp painter Luc Tuymans to make a piece for the new Museumplein, laid out by Jan Van Haute from Tuymans’s concept, and it was his first work for a public space. Dead Skull is a mosaic of 96,569 stones in eleven tones and four sizes, 40 metres by 40, inaugurated on 17 May 2010, a year before the museum. Tuymans based it on his own painting of 2002, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which in turn shows a 17th-century memorial stone on the cathedral for Quinten Matsys, the painter who helped found the Antwerp school around 1500. It is best seen from above: look down from the boulevard on the way up.

Floor by floor

The MAS holds more than 600,000 objects, about 460,000 of which were moved into the building when it opened, and only a small share is on show across 5,700 square metres of exhibition space. Some of the rest is visible in the Kijkdepot on the second floor, a glass-fronted storeroom that is free to enter. In the museum’s first year it was already the most popular room in the building. Rotterdam opened Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in November 2021, a mirrored bowl by MVRDV with 151,000 works inside, and billed it as the world’s first publicly accessible art depot. Antwerp had been letting visitors look into its storeroom for ten years by then.

The current Kijkdepot displays include eight people presenting a tradition they still practise, each with one object that matters to them. The third floor takes the temporary exhibition. Until 29 November 2026 that is Martial Arts, on kickboxing, karate, capoeira, kung fu and Nguni stick fighting; We Are Here, on queer stories of belonging, follows from 26 February to 30 August 2027.

View this post on Instagram

The semi-permanent rooms begin on the fourth floor with Stad in oorlog, on Antwerp from 1940 to 1945, open since September 2023. It tells the war through daily life, the cinema, the empty shops, the school, the factory, and through objects such as two identity cards that belonged to Regine Beer, a Nazi flag taken down from the cathedral tower and pages from the city’s register of Jews. It also covers the V1 and V2 rockets that hit the city in the final year of the war. Antwerpen à la carte, on the fifth floor, tells the city’s history through its food chain.

Vracht, on the sixth, replaced the old World Port display in December 2021 after ten years. It is laid out as six docks, one per period, from the Romans and Vikings to the 20th-century port. Among its exhibits is a pair of bones fished out of the Scheldt in the 16th century and long shown as the remains of the giant Antigoon. They belonged to a whale. The seventh floor holds Iemand thuis?, a family exhibition about home whose cast includes a crocodile from the sewers.

The eighth floor is Kunst van Amerika, built on the Paul and Dora Janssen-Arts collection: more than 400 pre-Columbian objects in gold, jade, stone, textile and shell, from over 50 cultures. The Flemish government gave the collection to the city on permanent loan in 2008, and the room uses it to show how people in the Americas lived with their gods, ancestors and spirits before the European conquest.

View this post on Instagram

Three stars, and a roof that costs nothing

The ninth floor belongs to Zilte, the restaurant of the chef Viki Geunes. Geunes started it in Mol, won a first Michelin star in 2004 and a second in 2008, and moved to the MAS when the city offered him the ninth floor in 2011. Shortly before the pandemic the restaurant moved to the other side of the tower, and the third star came in 2021. “When we got the third star, we knew we had made the right choice,” he told the Michelin Guide a year later. Zilte is now one of two three-star restaurants in Belgium, with Boury in Roeselare. The dining room serves 30 to 35 guests a sitting, with six people in service and ten in the kitchen. About 40 per cent of the guests come from abroad, and the eight-course menu is listed at €340.

One floor up is the roof. A ticket for the galleries costs €12, or €8 for those aged 18 to 25, and under-18s go free. The Kijkdepot, the boulevard and the rooftop panorama cost nothing and need no ticket. That free route is the best decision in the building, because it is the part Neutelings designed around: it opens at 9:30 and stays open until 22:00, or until midnight from April to October, long after the boxes close at 17:00. In its first year the MAS drew more than 700,000 visitors, 45 per cent of them non-paying, and it was the most visited museum in Belgium; its busiest day was Whit Monday, with about 7,000 people. In 2025 the galleries, the boulevard and the roof drew 562,000 between them.

From the roof, the cathedral appears once. On the escalators, with luck, it appears twice.