In the Warehouse of Deformed Metal Masterpieces

Tucked away on a densely populated steep hillside deep in the heart of Bairro Alto in Lisbon hides a museum. Without an address or telephone number or listing in any guide book or magazine, it is instead openly triangulatable via transponders within the aptly chosen Largo de Camões, Largo Barão de Quintela and Largo Rafael Bordelo Pinheiro, three urban parks named for a poet, an artist, and a mercantilist, where the three clandestine transponders periodically emit silent shrieks. Their piercing chirps, well beyond the auditory ken of humans and dogs, play a three dimensional tune, mostly in the zenith direction, as a function of the errors in the position determined by a receiver on the museum roof.

To reach the museum you start from the nearest park, that named for the mercantilist, carrying a beacon (for which a token fee is charged) that guides with a signal displayed on a small pad in red for warm and blue for cold. It took me an hour to home in on the location, but sunspots may have interfered.

For those wishing to avoid the search, be aware that the rented beacon is also your key to entry, and without it there is no entrance. The only apparent doors are on the side opposite the entrance, boarded shut. What appears to be a sooty brick wall with broken windows high up at the third or forth floor level is in fact the entryway.

The visit is worth the game. You stumble upon an unidentified, rundown, in fact decrepit, nondescript building no one would suspect of harboring intricate metal sculptures, yet once the seamless portal opens and you step into the spacious warehouse you cannot doubt you are in the presence of greatness. The name inscribed inside says it all without arousing suspicion of announcing one of the world's grand museums of fine art: Armazém de Obra-primas em Metal Deformado.

Immediately upon passing through the small portal revealed within the brick wall the senses are overwhelmed by an assault of electronic screeches from the amplified error signal of the triangulations together with a clangor of gigantic metal pieces grinding and clanking above a drone like thousands of simultaneous blackboard rasps. Vast space swarms with crushed and deformed floating metal behemoths, homotopic to their manufactured mates but now continuously deformed in the twinkling of an eye as if by natural fiat into unique works of beauty, designs twisted into new creations of overwhelming order and simplicity.

Viewing these masterworks levitating from floor to ceiling, tumbling through the air in a delicate ballet to the constant hum and drone of machinery, all at different stages of ascent and descent, one cannot but be knocked out. Literally, if not careful. Rumors of death swirl around the museum, so stay within the ropes, please, and then maintain vigilance. A posting outside the door (the door that is boarded shut, not the entrance) informs that you enter at your own risk, but it is printed in the obscure African dialect of the owner of the museum, a holdover from colonial times. In fact, only the name of the place is in Portuguese, with the descriptions and titles and even the brochures in this indecipherable dialect. The guides all speak only this language, and I have been informed that they are chosen for this reason. They wear madras plaid tuxedos with short pants and flip flops. They are also rumored to push the unwary viewer under tumbling metal carnage, but I saw none of this.

Feast your eyes on the silver Audi TT, its grillwork and logo perfect, its headlights and taillights undamaged, yet for all the world a convertible with a flattened roof, its tires and wheels protruding at right angles to the body.

The red Ferrari perfect from front seat to front bumper, cockpit preserved while the rear of the vehicle seems to have vaporized in a fit of pique.

My personal favorite, the red Ford escort wrapped like a piece of licorice twist around a lovely tree, all of it pirouetting and tumbling as though blown by some invisible wind.

A compact Honda CRX compacted into a blue box. A military green Hummer's front crumbled like a fat face smashed in, teeth pushed up into the wide eyes. An accordion of a Jeep Cherokee, its engine and front wheels shoved into the storage compartment. A flattened eggplant of a Lamborghini, wheels scraped away, spinning and cavorting in a happy dance with its neighbor, a brick red Mercedes CLK torn in half, the rear passenger compartment side by side with the front seats and facing the opposite direction. Of course, there must be a black Mercedes SLK mangled and creased, its front tires pointing at right angles to its body like a pair of blackened eyes on the smirking mug of a pugnacious, walleyed prizefighter.

Another favorite, the green Opel Astra, front end mashed like a flattened soda can, top peeled back and laid open like sardine can, the decadent design of a God of metal sculpture.

Only a tongue taste of the glorious sculptures awaiting the viewer can be described in this short review. But no viewer with an ounce of aesthetic sensibility and common sense can come away from these exquisite marvels of precise creation without knowing that behind each and every one of them must be a truly gifted, intelligent designer, a creative intelligence of the highest order. To fabricate such wonders could not be done by chance.

To visit this museum, present yourself at the Largo Rafael Bordelo Pinheiro and wait. Eventually someone dressed in rags appears and asks for money. When you present the proper amount to the correct panhandler, you will be handed your beacon.

The museum has no address and keeps no regular hours. I visited at midnight after a month of trying.

Maurice Stoker

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