SO-IL's Beeline Textle Installation at MAAT Museum Lisbon

SO-IL Beeline, MAAT Museum Lisbon, Textile Installation, Photo Francisco Nogueira | Yellowtrace

Beeline by NYC architecture firm SO-IL is an installation that occupies the entire MAAT museum, designed by the celebrated British architect Amanda Levete in 2016, located on the riverfront in the historic district of Belem, Lisbon. The large scale, multi-storey architectural intervention was the first exhibition to open in the museum since its forced closure due to the pandemic.

A special clandestine entrance has been created for the exhibition. This city facing the entrance, through the museum’s loading dock, plays with physical space to redefine and re-engage the local residents with the museum. It also creates a direct path through the museum to the quayside. Designed to house Maat MODE, a six-month experimental public programme of talks and events, the intervention “not only transforms the way visitors enter and experience MAAT”, explains Florian Idenburg co-founder of SO-IL, “but also challenges the implied hierarchies of spaces in a traditional museum and provide flexibility for an ever-evolving organisation.”

Textile of varying transparency is stretched over architectural structures to form enclosed and open interactive spaces to draw people in as they wander through the passageway. The structures range from sounds capsules, video rooms, elevated pathways, stage sets, hammocks to even a trampoline. Playful and engaging, the installation fosters discourse around the conventions and formal identities of cultural institutions.

Beatrice Leanza, the executive director of MAAT sees the future of galleries and museums evolving to be more agile and resilient. This timely exhibition finds visitors and the institution learning and growing together. Leanza describes Maat MODE as a “transformative gesture that repurposes the museum into a polyfunctional civic arena where public life is debated, probed, challenged and possibly inspired towards a more inclusive and equitable making of the future.”

Running alongside Beeline is an exhibition showcasing some of SO-IL’s short term installations from the last decade. Titled Currents – Temporary architectures by SO–IL, the exhibition interrogates the nature of architecture and shows how SO–IL’s temporary projects have informed their more permanent works.

Beyond their own work, the architects also designed 15 mobile and reconfigurable art storage units scattered throughout the space. Featuring intimate archival works and materials from a collection of artists for The Peepshow – Artists from the EDP Foundation Portuguese Art Collection.

French designer Sam Baron developed a friendly communication system in line with new health and safety regulations. The gentle and unique design language flows through the building, using common bricks, reflective surfaces, and personal graphic language to remind visitors of how to respect the current rules.

Beatrice Leanza and SO–IL have marked a new era for the Amanda Levete-designed MAAT with this mammoth yet ethereal 1390 square metre intervention. Respect.