MAAT and the Central Tejo Power Station

Museum · BelémLisbon,Portugal

A Lisbon coal power station left with its boilers, conveyors and control panels in place, beside a new white gallery with a walkable roof.

MAAT is two buildings on the Belém waterfront: a brick power station you walk through the inside of, and a low white gallery beside it. In the power station you pass between boilers three storeys high, along the coal conveyors that fed them, and past slate control panels with brass switches still set where the last shift left them. Nothing was taken out when it stopped generating. The white building next door is a low curve of white tile against the brick. The brick hall was finished in 1919 around a small generating plant and enlarged again through the 1930s, and it burned coal to light a capital city. The national grid eventually overtook it: first a stand-by, then nothing. The white gallery beside it opened in 2016 as a museum of art, architecture and technology. That pairing is the reason to come. Belém behind you is monuments. This stretch of the river is the plant that actually ran the twentieth-century city, and you can walk from the boiler floor out onto the white roof in a couple of minutes.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The roof and the ramp need no ticket and no opening hour — the most used part of the museum is the outdoor one, on a stretch of riverbank that used to be fenced-off industrial land.
Go into the power station first — it is always the same, while the shows in the new gallery change and are sometimes thin, so the old building is what the ticket is really worth.
The white tiles change with the weather — the cladding is crackle-glazed and picks up the sky and the river, so the same building looks grey, silver or gold depending on the hour.
It is east of the monuments on the same waterfront — you reach it along the river rather than through Belém itself.

Things to do

1
Follow the coal from the wharf to the fire
Inside the power station, start at the conveyors and walk the route the fuel took: from the river wharf, up into the bunkers, along to the boiler fronts. The whole chain is in place. Very few industrial buildings anywhere let you walk the process rather than look at parts of it in cases.
2
Stand in front of the control panels
Find the slate boards with their brass switches, dials and hand-painted labels. This is how a capital city's electricity was managed: by people watching needles and pulling handles in a room, with no screen anywhere. The rest of the building is machinery, and this is the one room where the work was done by hand.
3
Walk the white roof at dusk
Go up the ramp onto the curved roof of the new gallery and walk it end to end. The bridge stands upstream, the river runs below the parapet, and the brick power station rises beside you. Going up one side and down the other puts the two buildings in sequence rather than side by side.