MAAT Museum Lisbon

MAAT Museum Lisbon

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, MAAT. This museum is absolutely worth visiting! It is situated in two buildings with a completely different style. You can find this museum on the Belém waterside in the capital city of Portugal, Lisbon.
 
Buildings
First of all the buildings are amazing. They have a modern building, designed by the British architecture office ‘Amanda Levete Architects’, AL_A. The shape of the building is very organic. It feels a little like it flows up out of the ground and on the other side flows back in. It is mostly white what gives it a peaceful feeling in the surrounding. You can walk on the roof and have an amazing view over the river.
It has four spaces: the main gallery, the oval gallery, the video room and the project room.
They contain a permanent collection of Portuguese artists and you also find temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

The other building from the museum is the Tejo Power Station. This building is actually two parts. The ‘Low-Pressure Phase’ and ‘High-Pressure Phase’. The Low-Pressure Phase was built in 1910 and has early Modernist style architectural elements. They started building the High-Pressure Phase in 1940. The style is a little different from the Low-Pressure Phase. Here the classicist influences took over a bit, but they kept the same brick cladding aesthetic.
In this building, you can find the old machinery rooms and several exhibition areas.

Exhibition
When I visited MAAT there were different exhibitions. In the Tejo Power station were a few different exhibitions and you could go around in the Power Station Tour. I liked this tour a lot because it made me experience the stories behind the old buildings.

The exhibition in this building that I loved the most was Carlos Bunga. The Architecture of Life. In all the work the main material was cardboard, this is also the reason I loved the work. In some way, it feels so simple with cardboard and the cardboard also gave a kind of cheap look to me. But here it was: different shapes, different colours and because of how the artworks were made and presented, it did tell all different kind of stories.

There was another exhibition in this building ‘Hello Robot. Design between human and Machine.’ Some of it gave me a weird feeling… They showed and questioned how robots took over humanity. For example, caring for babies; ‘how do you feel about objects having feelings?’ It made me think of The Matrix (movie) and it showed that we really are going in that direction that robots take over.

In the new MAAT building, I also saw several exhibitions. There was a lot of 2D art, mostly pictures from different artists to see.
My goosebump moment was by some two world war art by João Louro called; Linguistic Ground Zero. There was not much on display, the main thing in the room was a big atomic bomb hanging in the room. It was quite impressive! Also, the fact that it hangs so peacefully there but to know how much damage it can do and has done.

Deze schuingedrukte zinnen even kijken in welke volgorde je die wilt. (de eerste zin kan ook bovenaan)

A museum that combines it all: Beautiful location, interesting old and new architecture and a great variety of exhibitions.

Here you can read how I walk through museums and some of my personal advise while visiting.