On Friday afternoon, June 4, we are in traffic on the Antwerp ring. We see our destination on the skyline. The new MAS (Museum aan de Stroom) is like a beacon on the north side of town. It looks beautiful from a distance. It was designed by Willem Jan Neutelings, a Dutch architect living in Belgium. A sixty-meter-high stone tower of ten stacked containers is a reference to the former warehouses in the harbour area. Within the building the history of the city and the world are stacked like goods. The closed lit rooms are still turned a quarter, surrounded by a huge spiral staircase that creates a vertical route along all the halls. This freely accessible route with beautiful views of the city and country is called the MAS-boulevard. Neutelings gives the tour. Remarkably, all the rooms are empty, except the café beyond. The MAS has a special history of origin. At the end of the 90s, the politicians came up with the idea to take the many small museums in Antwerp and assemble them into a single museum to better preserve the impoverished collection and make them accessible to a wider audience and to breathe new life to the declining harbour area. First make initial investments with public money, and then the market will follow with project developers and restaurant owners.

A good café-restaurant will be placed in the museum, on the ground floor and on the terrace so that the building itself becomes a social meeting place. In 2000, Neutelings won the architecture competition, and up until 2005 the city has been raising funds. This succeeds with the city and the nation as lender. Construction began in 2006 and in 2010 the MAS is completed. A museum director was appointed during the construction of the project and since then has been working on the contents of the building. An interior designer has recently been commissioned to work with the curators to make a selection from the collection of 300,000 objects from approximately ten museums.
It is the first exhibition to tell the (international) history of Antwerp. The remaining objects are being preserved in a cheap warehouse on the outskirts of town. A museum should be like a theater in which all forms of staging of various performing arts are possible.

Some days later, in the Parliament, the discussion of the National history museum is back on. Fairytales about the € 60 million cost for the parking garage make their rounds while the budget for the museum itself is € 50 million. The museum is without a building, but it does have two directors and several curators, and it organizes exhibitions and concerts everywhere, except in the museum with which it is supposed to cooperate: The National Heritage Museum. The Netherlands now has close to 16 million soccer league coaches also 16 million museum directors. A frequently heard comment is that in the last three years some € 5 million per year has been spent on reports, studies, excursions, exhibitions and concerts but that money could have been used to realize a parking garage that costs approximately € 7.5 million. Ballast Nedam previously showed that the building could be delivered within budget and on time. But others had other suggestions: Paleis Soestdijk, the Army Museum in Delft and the Dirk Scheringa Museum are empty. The Hague and Amsterdam have always found that their own city is the best place. How about Antwerp? The rooms are good, a great day out, good food, and finally we can bring the history of the Netherlands back together.

Francine Houben, Het Financieele Dagblad, 12 juli 2010