Earlier this year I attended a travel blogging conference in Rotterdam and squeezed in an extra day which I spent exploring the best of Rotterdam’s architecture.
I hadn’t realised this was the theme for my day until afterwards when I was looking over everything I’d done that day. That everything seemed to be about architecture really sums up Rotterdam.
Rotterdam has struggled with second-city syndrome for years. Not only does it have to compete with Amsterdam (which would be stiff competition in any country), but it also has to compete which much smaller, but very much better known places like Delft.
The city was pretty much flattened by bombing in 1940. After the war the city’s fathers decided to start anew rather than rebuild what had previously been there. Although the motto for the city’s renewal was ‘light, air and space’ it was all rather soulless. I remember on my one and only previous visit to Rotterdam many years ago, wandering around and feeling like I could be in any modern, but boring city in the world. The city wasn’t just lacking soul, but also lacking a heart.
I visited the cube houses which seemed to be the only thing Rotterdam was famous for. Although they were nice and rather interesting they weren’t nice or interesting enough to justify an entire weekend break based in Rotterdam.
Am I being too harsh? Let’s see:
Before you read further here’s a little test.
Think about everything that comes to mind when you hear ‘Rotterdam’. What do you think of? Can you name a famous person from Rotterdam? A movie or novel set there? A work of literature or art? A famous building? A type of cuisine associated particularly with Rotterdam? A historical event other than it being bombed flat in the war? Hell, can you even name the football team?
Unless you’ve been to Rotterdam recently then your response is probably
‘er … er … er …. no’.
Actually even if you have been recently your answers to the majority of the questions probably weren’t much different to this.
Don’t feel bad about it. This article I read (which is actually well worth a read even though it was written about twenty years ago) points out that Rotterdam’s literature scene is booming. Books and newspaper articles are in plentiful supply and, to quote directly from the article,
“… few cities in the Netherlands are so frequently and intensively discussed in local writing as Rotterdam … One could say that Rotterdam is constructed not by its architects, but by its local writers.”
In fact so much has been written about Rotterdam that the city has a bookshop, Snoek, specialising in books by local authors and photographers as well as non-fiction books about Rotterdam.
If there’s really so much written about Rotterdam why am I telling you not to feel bad? Because none of it is written in English. Yep, although there has been so much written on Rotterdam it hasn’t been translated. So unless you’re Dutch you won’t know about it.
Fast forward about twenty years and I was actually quite excited when I heard that Rotterdam was to be the location of the Traverse 18 travel blogging conference. Excited because it meant I could tag on a trip to Amsterdam, a city I really love, and catch up with a friend. But of course, I was also a little bit excited to see if Rotterdam had undergone the regeneration so many places have and if I’d change my mind about it.
So what did I discover?
Wilhemina Pier and the New York Hotel
The conference was held in the LP2, a former warehouse on the regenerated Wilhemina Pier. This area was part of the old docklands though there isn’t much left that would be recognised by a docker now. The pier has mostly new and modern buildings. Even the LP2 which used to be the workshop for the Holland and America Line has undergone so much renovation it could be a new building.
Down at the end of the pier however is the New York Hotel. This old brownstone building used to be the headquarters for the Holland America Line and it was from here that thousands of emigrants left Europe to seek new lives in the new world. I recently visited Ellis Island in New York and learnt the story of some of the immigrants. I did wonder how many of the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island actually started from Wilhemina Pier in Rotterdam.
The building, designed by the architects J. Muller and Droogleever Fortuin, was opened in 1901 and was granted Dutch National Heritage Site status in 2000. I didn’t actually go inside which I now think was a massive oversight as from pictures I’ve seen it all looks rather nice. I’m sure I’ll visit Rotterdam again though and I’ll definitely go back and make sure I check out the inside too.
Around the outside of the hotel and the end of pier is green parkland with plenty of seating. On the warm, sunny day I visited there were lots of people strolling, playing with children, walking dogs or sitting and enjoying the sun.
De Rotterdam Building
The De Rotterdam Building is one of those buildings that makes you want to take photos in every kind of light and from every possible angle. Three tall interlinked buildings stand across from Wilhemina Pier like sentries on the far side of the Erasmus Bridge. What makes them look so unusual is the way in which the top half of each tower looks like it’s been shoved over a bit so it doesn’t quite sit where it should.
The name De Rotterdam refers to the SS Rotterdam which was a steamship that once ran regularly from here to New York. (The ship in fact still exists and is now a hotel and restaurant.) The towers, at not quite 150m high, are not Rotterdam’s tallest. What it lacks in height however, it makes up for in bulk. The building isn’t just Rotterdam’s largest, but Europe’s largest. It covers as much ground as a football pitch and 5,000 people live and work in its offices and apartments. It also contains a hotel, restaurants and cafes.
Built in 2013 to a design by Rem Koolhaas, it was awarded the accolade ‘best tall building in Europe’ in 2014 by The Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).
Erasmus Bridge
The Erasmus Bridge (Erasmusbrug) stretches across the Maas and connects the north and south parts of Rotterdam. It was designed by Ben van Berkel and opened by Queen Beatrix in 1996. The bridge has been nicknamed the Swan because of its 139m high pylon which supports the cables.
The bridge is named after 17th century priest, humanist and renaissance scholar, Desiderius Erasmus. As the Dutch figure most associated with Rotterdam his name crops up all over the place. If you managed to name a famous person from Rotterdam in the test above then it was probably Erasmus. But I’m only going to give you half a point. Why? Because Rotterdam is really clutching at straws when they use him as their claim to fame. Although born in Rotterdam, he left when he was a few years old and never returned. Not even for a short visit.
The WereldMuseum
The WereldMuseum is Rotterdam’s ethnographic museum. It sits just across the Erasmus Bridge from Wilhemina Pier. The museum was closed for renovations when I was there … but I still got to see it. When you attend the Traverse Conference you also get to attend the evening events, one of which was held in the empty WereldMuseum building. (They had a few exhibits in one room downstairs, but other than that they had all been removed.)
The building is one that survived the war and is rather fabulous. On the outside it’s white and curved and looks a bit boat-like. Appropriate then that it became home to the Royal Yacht Club in 1851.
Inside it’s all wide staircases and high ceilings with ornate cornices and views over the river. It was lovely to experience it empty and really be able to appreciate the building without the distraction of museum cases and artefacts, but I definitely want to go back and see it as a museum too.
The Cube Houses
High on my list of places to visit during my day exploring Rotterdam were the cube houses. Although I’d seen them before I really wanted to have another look, so I got myself on the metro and headed over to Blaak Station.
The cubes were the idea of Piet Blom and built in 1984. What’s unusual about them is that each cube house sits on its point atop a pillar. I wrote a whole post about them so I won’t go into more detail here.
The Markthal
If you visit the cube houses you have to visit the Markthal too. It sits right beside Blaak Station and, like the cube houses, there’s no way you can miss it.
The horseshoe-shaped Markthal, or Market Hall, reminded me of a giant Nissan Hut. The chunky arch contains apartment buildings and the hollow centre a large food market with around 100 stalls. Food shops and restaurants are set into the sides of the arch and in the basement is a car park and a supermarket. The building was designed by architectural firm MVRDV.
The reason the Markthal has become such a must-visit site isn’t because of all the fabulous food, though that should be reason enough, but because the entire inside of the arch is covered with a huge, colourful mural depicting plants and insects. The mural is called the ‘Horn of Plenty’ and was designed by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam.
If you look closely at the mural you see it is dappled with windows. These windows belong to the apartments. As you move your eyes up the side of the arch the windows continue, curving with the arch. The walls on this side of the apartments must be almost as bizarrely angled as the ones in the cube houses. And I assume the apartments at the top must have windows in the floor.
Sonneveld House
I love visiting houses, particularly when they still have a feeling of being someone’s home. I get plenty of inspiration from them and usually spend ages just wandering around trying to imagine what it would like to live there. Of course, when I researched my day in Rotterdam and images of Sonneveld House kept popping up I knew I had to go there.
Sonneveld House was designed in 1933 by architects Brinkman and Van der Vlugt for factory owner Albertus Sonneveld. Here’s the blurb from the website:
“The architects designed a total concept in which architecture, interior and furnishings are perfectly coordinated and reinforce one another. Light and spacious, the house features numerous balconies and large areas of fenestration that offer views of the surrounding garden. Almost all items of furniture and lamps in the house were made by the firm of Gispen, some of them specially for the Sonnevelds. This customization reveals the family’s appreciation of luxury and comfort. Sonneveld House is therefore not a dogmatic example of functionalism, but a personal environment.”
Confession: I had to look up what ‘fenestration’ meant. In case you don’t know either, it’s an architectural term for the arrangement of windows in a building.
And yes, there were a lot of windows.
I loved this house from the moment I stepped inside. I loved it even more when I discovered the study had orange chairs.
The house was filled with mod cons liked telephones in the bedrooms and heated towel rails in the bathrooms. The kitchen was just as modern and perfectly designed as the rest of the house, which was unusual as at this time the kitchen would have been the domain of the servants and a family of this class would rarely have stepped foot in it. And no visitor would have seen it so it wasn’t there to impress.
The thought put into the working environment of the servants extended to their living environment too. The two maids’ bedrooms weren’t that much different to the bedrooms of the family’s daughters and they also had a rather nice and modern bathroom set as an en suite between their bedrooms.
Chabot Museum
I wanted to see some art whilst I was in Rotterdam. After all, art is something the Netherlands is well known for. I didn’t have time to do a big art gallery justice so the Chabot Museum seemed the perfect compromise as it’s quite compact. It’s also inside another famous house and so I got to kill two birds with one stone and visit another beautiful house at the same time as looking at art.
The house is a white villa designed in 1938 by Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, the same architects as designed the Sonneveld House. Here’s the blurb from the website:
“The villa in modernist style was initially built as a private residence for the Kraaijeveld family. Distinguishing features of the house are light and airy spaces, a typical openness to the garden and a unique view of the Museumpark and its surroundings. A visit to the homely, light and elegant Chabot Museum combines modern art, architecture and history.”
The house is now home to the works of Dutch expressionist Henk Chabot (1894-1949) and the exhibition consists of both paintings and sculpture. There are also temporary exhibitions by different artists on display.
As the house is now a museum most of the internal walls, particularly upstairs, have been removed to provide an open-plan gallery, so it was a little hard for me to imagine what it would have been like as a family home. In the basement is a film (which wasn’t working when I visited) and a self-service cafe: self-service as in you put the kettle on and make yourself a brew. Which of course I did.
Even though, I couldn’t really get the feel of the house as a home it was still a wonderful building to visit and I loved the art. Chabot isn’t an artist I was particularly familiar with before my visit so it was nice to learn about him and get up close and personal with his art.
Netherlands Architecture Institute
It was getting late in the afternoon by the time I’d checked all the places I wanted to visit off my list, but I thought I could squeeze in one more. The Netherlands Architecture Institute is just across the road from Sonneveld House and my Sonneveld House ticket included entry to the Institute. It seemed a shame to be so close, have a ticket and not go in, even though I knew my visit would be a bit rushed.
The Institute (Het Nieuwe Instituut in Dutch) is housed in a concrete block with a pond. From the outside it looks brutal and unforgiving, but inside is a large open and airy space. There’s a cafe and bookshop and the city’s architectural archives are kept here.
I’ve struggled to find accurate information about the building (maybe it’s that old thing about plenty being written, just not translated). It was designed by architect Rem Koolhaas in 1988, but the building or possibly just a renovated version of it opened in 2011. And the designer might have been Jo Coenen, not Rem Koolhaas. I’m confused. If anyone knows please leave a comment below.
Anyhow, on my visit I wandered round the main parts of the building, going upstairs so I could get a good view of the huge atrium below. Then I went into the exhibition which was about gardens. Not any old gardens, but ‘Dissident Gardens’.
“Dissident Gardens questions the consequences of striving for optimal landscapes and a perfected nature during an ecological crisis.”
The displays featured a vertical garden, farming and food production, and a garden on Mars. The idea behind the exhibition (I think) was to make us think about how we use our space to meet our needs for food and aesthetics whilst not destroying the environment and causing an ecological catastrophe.
The Floating Forest
My final stop of the day was the Floating Forest. As this is outdoors it doesn’t have a closing time and so I was no in rush to get to it. Except I did end up being in a rush because the weather changed, the sky turned black and I could tell it was about to rain really heavily.
The Floating Forest is more installation art than architecture, but I’ve included it here because it does form part of the wider landscape and adds to the overall look of the cityscape.
It was based on the idea of sculptor Jorge Bakker. In 2016 twenty old North Sea buoys were upcycled into plant pots and each had a tree planted inside it. The buoys were specially adapted and re-floated in Rotterdam’s old harbour basin, Rijnhaven. They are sealed so the trees are not exposed to the sea water; instead each buoy has a 500 litre tank fitted below it which supplies the trees with fresh water. Soil and rocks in each buoy also enables the trees to grow and remain healthy.
They made quite a fascinating sight and I would have loved to have the chance to wander round the harbour getting pics from different angles. It wasn’t to be as the first drops of rain started falling as I arrived. Within seconds the water was patterned with rain drops. I snapped some pictures quickly and then dashed back to the metro station before I got my camera wet.
And that was the end of my architecturally themed day out in Rotterdam. Rotterdam has so much to offer now, that even before I’d left I was already planning how I’d spend a few days here next time I visit the Netherlands. It’s not just the architecture, though I have plenty more of that to see. During my time at the conference I also discovered some pretty nice places to eat and drink and places I want to spend more time wandering around. And there are all the museums to visit too.
Rotterdam, I think you have both heart and soul now and I can’t wait to come back.
Have you been to Rotterdam? What do you recommend I see next time? And have you ever been surprised by the regeneration of a place you’ve visited? Share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments below.
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