Founded by Napoleon in 1810, the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, or KMSKA) houses a world-class collection that includes 16 Rubenses, six Van Dycks, countless paintings by early Flemish masters, Belgium’s most extensive James Ensor holdings, and much, much more. In 1890, the KMSKA moved to its current, purpose-built home in the new neighborhood of Het Zuid, of which it was the centerpiece. The fruit of a forced marriage between the joint winners of a design competition, Jean-Jacques Winders and Frans Van Dijk (who reputedly hated each other), the eclectically ornamented Beaux-Arts temple dominates its surroundings. Already too small by 1925, when it was first reconfigured, the building was again refurbished in 1976. Untouched and unloved in the quarter century that followed, it had become a creaking, leaking liability by the turn of the millennium. A 2003 call for ideas, with a brief both to renovate and expand, produced a winning master plan by Rotterdam-based KAAN Architecten. Closed in 2011, the revamped KMSKA finally reopened 11 years later, in September 2022.