Ghent is a city of all times and the same applies to STAM's infrastructure, which is itself part of the story STAM tells. Your visit begins in the contemporary surroundings of the new building. You then follow the permanent circuit through the ancient abbey. The convent hosts temporary exhibitions and the like.
The magnificent abbey and convent buildings on the Bijloke site are worth a visit in their own right. The abbey boasts one of the most beautiful refectories in Western Europe, decorated with fine pre-Van Eyckian wall paintings. The ambulatory, the dormitory, the abbey church, the enclosed garden and the adjacent seventeenth-century convent add to the beauty of this extraordinary patrimony which has been restored.
A broad path has been laid out from Ghent’s inner ring-road past the museum’s fine garden and pond to STAM. The new and contemporary reception building is the entrance to the Bijloke site and in a certain sense to the whole city, since it also includes an information centre on cultural tourism in Ghent.
