The museum is called STAM (Stad+Museum), and it opened earlier this month in the substantial grounds of the Bijloke music and culture centre after a decade in the making. In all that time, it's been the pet project of the woman who's now its director, Christine De Weerdt. An art historian by training, De Weerdt has worked on large-scale projects like Antwerp 93, when the port city was European capital of culture.
From 2000, she worked within the heritage department of the city of Ghent, "when the Flemish government came up with a plan to give local heritage more visibility," she explains over coffee in the glass cube of STAM's restaurant. "The thinking was, it would be easier to get people to care about their heritage if they knew more about it."
One of the first exhibitions the city staged was on the theme of travel, "and we mounted it right there on the platforms of Ghent's Sint-Pieters station," she says, "with material from the archives that had never been exhibited before."
It was that heritage work that grew into the development of a city museum. Ghent already had a municipal museum, also housed on the Bijloke site in a former convent and hospital. But it was dry and uninspiring: "Nobody came, even though it had some wonderful material," De Weerdt says. Towards the end, it was only open two afternoons a week.
"We decided to work another way," De Weerdt continues. "Instead of arranging materials according to category - Chinese porcelain for example - we would only show pieces that fit into the story of Ghent."
Out of 17,000 pieces in storage, only 300 made it into STAM - and some of those come from holdings in Antwerp and Bruges. The objects and documents in storage are loaned to outside exhibitions and can also be used within STAM for temporary shows, such as the current one, De belichte stad. "These are all things that lay unseen for years," says De Weerdt.
Of Ghent, for everyone
STAM is a museum of Ghent but not only for Ghent. The city will also market the museum to tourists from both inside and outside Belgium. As De Weerdt explains it, the museum is something like a mental parcours. The entrance is part of the cuboid glass extension added to the old abbey, monumental in scale and stark in design. "You begin in the Ghent of today, with that enormous aerial photo."
That's where the cloth slippers come in. The floor of one room is fitted with a massive photo made up of more than 300 tiles showing an aerial view of the entire city, on a scale of 1:1000. Each square-metre tile is one square kilometre on the ground. On the opening weekend - a grand affair with live performances and music that drew 12,500 visitors - locals were searching for their houses. The story of Ghent then goes back to the origins of the city. What's most striking about this section is the design and its integration of multimedia. Computer screens provide a wide range of information on the city, based on four maps. The first is a painting from 1534, then maps from 1641, 1912 and, finally, 2008. At every stage, the changes in this city - which at one time had more people than Paris - are highlighted. There are also TV screens, touch screen tables and even holograms.
For the moment, the language on the computers is only Dutch, but English, French and German are on the way. In the exhibition proper, the main information for each room is already in the four languages, as are extra information sheets. Over in the temporary exhibition, every room has the same sheets, found just by the door. One area of the museum has in fact been kept virtually empty: the old refectory, which dates from the 14th century. This is where the nuns used to eat, the high
walls painted with medieval frescoes dating from before the time of Jan Van Eyck.
Now, too, there are tables laid out, but they are modern and slot together to form a stage so the room can occasionally be used for small concerts. Built into the base of each table is a store for chairs for the audience. That marriage of modern design and an ancient setting is typical of the whole museum: not a speck of dust anywhere, but a real feel for the past, presented in a modern way.
The Illuminated City
The choice of De belichte stad (The Illuminated City) as the inaugural temporary exhibition is inspired, and not only because the essence of all art, including sculpture, is the play of light and shade. This exhibition is housed in what seems like an endless series of tiny room surrounding an inner courtyard garden.
These are the offices and dormitories of the former convent inhabitants. The cloistered life is, we're reminded, a life determined by the light - from matins to vespers, the lives of monks and nuns are governed by the sun. The opposition of Light and Dark is also the supreme metaphor of religion.
The illuminated city in question is not exclusively Ghent: the tour begins with 20 video screens showing City One Minutes - one-minute films made in various cities around the world. Highlights in the succeeding rooms include a single view of a nondescript street corner, the Belgielei in Antwerp, painted in spring, summer and autumn by Hugo Heyrman.
Studies in ink for a "book of hours" by the great Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel are light and shade pushed to the extreme: black and white prints, there are no shades of grey in woodcuts. Photos in vivid colour of scenes in Paris and New York by the American photographer Saul Letter explain his huge reputation. There are also installations, one of which features 1:200 maquettes of Ghent city blocks lit by an artificial sun, the workings of which I won't give away, because you have to see it in action. One whole room is transformed into the "living room of a collector" with 1950s furniture and display cases showing off ashtrays, enamel advertising panels, lamps, candlesticks and playing cards, all riffing on the theme of light. A TV playing in the background has interviews with artists.
Multimedia, so present elsewhere in the museum, is included in a charming lo-tech kind of way in one tiny corridor, both sides lined with the stamp collection of Antoon Devogelaere. The stamps are all under glass, and on the wall hang a dozen plastic magnifying glasses on chains. No better way has yet been discovered for looking at stamps.
Along the way, the theme of the 24-hour cycle is played out in illustrations from the journal of Christiaan Andriessen (1775-1846), a Dutchman who aspired to be a painter but never achieved his ambition. His journals, containing some 700 illustrations of everyday life, did become famous, however, and most of them now reside in the Amsterdam state archives.
What Andriessen lacked in technique, he more than made up for in spontaneity. They're not what the fashion of his time called "picturesque," but more simple scenes of everyday life: walking in the mist, wishing each other Happy New Year, hauling coals from the fire for a guest's foot-warmer. If there's one thing that counts as a real discovery from this exhibition, the Andriessen drawings are it.
The tour ends in the abbey church, where light streams in through windows clear and stained, and where we're reminded once more of the importance of light to the Catholic rite, from the magnificence of a rose window to the simplicity of a beeswax candle.
Well, I say it "ends", but there's one more surprise: models of the four main towers of Ghent, constructed in Lego by Flemish comedian Dirk Denoyelle, who is one of a very few "Lego Certified Professionals" in the world. You can try your hand at matching him: the tables are heaped with thousands of pure white Lego blocks to play with.
The Bijlok
From about the 13th century, the Bijloke site has housed a hospital on land once owned by Joan of Constantinople, daughter of the Count of Flanders Boudewijn XII. Soon, a convent was attached to house the nuns who ministered to the sick, and it's in the former convent buildings that the STAM is now installed. The old municipal museum used to be here, and the site also houses a number of other artistic and cultural institutions.
STAM in figures
€15.5 million
total budget, with €8.6 million from the Flemish region, €4.8 million from the city of Ghent and €2 million from the province of East Flanders
2 hectares
covered by museum site, including 2,000 square metres for the permanent exhibition and 1,500 square metres for temporary exhibits
304
tiles, each one-metre-square, making up the aerial photo in the entrance hall, as well as 4,900 LED lamps
25
members of staff (and four volunteers)
80,000
visitors a year (estimated)
Flanders Today is a 
11°C / 22°C
