Lisbon (Portugal)

MAAT

Launched in October 2016 as part of EDP Foundation’s long-lasting commitment to cultural patronage, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (maat) is an international institution dedicated to fostering critical discourse and creative practice that inspire new understandings of the historical present and an empowering engagement with the common future. Located on the riverfront of the historic district of Belém, in Lisbon, the EDP Foundation campus covers an area of 38,000 square metres and comprises a repurposed power station — the Central Tejo, an iconic example of industrial architecture originally built in 1908 — and a newly built complex designed by the London-based architecture studio AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects). Both buildings house exhibitions and events programmed by the museum and are connected by a landscape project by Lebanese architect Vladimir Djurovic. Drawing upon the layered history preserved in its architectural and artistic heritage, maat advocates for the museum as a catalyst platform to render discourse actionable and empower audiences to own their choices through the articulation of debate, the sharing of positions and the formulation of knowledge. With the aim of encouraging an open-ended and transformative relationship between cultural institutions and societal change, the museum simultaneously interrogates and celebrates the intellectual ambitions and the creative means through which we imagine (with art), inhabit (with architecture) and create (with technology) the world we live in — that is, the ways in which we constantly redesign our collective undertakings in respect of the planetary ecosystem we belong to.