Rotterdam: from the heart of Dutch pragmatism to the ‘Manhattan on the Meuse’

You arrive in Roffa (Rotterdam in slang) and, right at Centraal Station – with its metal roof that has earned it the nickname ‘kapsalon’ (a traditional dish served in an aluminium tray) – you notice a distinct modernist flair; you cross The Swan – the nickname for the elegant Erasmus cable-stayed bridge – and see skyscrapers with flamboyant silhouettes: twisted, lopsided, dented; in short, designer. Head into the city centre and you’ll come across urban and housing regeneration sites with a social focus, such as the 70-metre-tall building that was once the headquarters of the now-defunct but glorious Catholic newspaper De Maasbode. In short, come to Rotterdam and immerse yourself in the great laboratory of the so-called ‘New Dutch’ – a Holland with fewer clogs and windmills, fewer Van Goghian or Flemish idylls (the preserve of Amsterdam’s museums), less nostalgia and a much greater hunger for the sky, not least because 80 per cent of Rotterdam lies below sea level.

But, as the Jesuit Michel de Certeau – the most brilliant pupil (alongside Hans Urs von Balthasar) of the French theologian Henri de Lubac – once stated, cities should not be understood from above, perhaps from a skyscraper, because this reduces one to a view external to life and to a mere scheme of urban-architectural planning power; a city must be ‘walked’; its map is ‘written’ by each urban traveller through their steps, their destinations, their routes, their detours, their shortcuts and their desires. Therefore, Rotterdam too must be walked, in search of its authentic present but also its past, both ancient and recent: one must go as far as Spangen to see Brinkmann’s remarkable social housing (1919), and to Kiefhoek to observe J.J.P. Oud’s social housing (1930). And little by little, a story emerges of Dutch pragmatism and Erasmian benevolence, of a propensity for experimentalism and an aptitude for social thought. Erasmus, its most illustrious citizen – the Augustinian who, according to the Franciscans, ‘laid the eggs that Luther hatched’ – asserted, in a spirit of community, that ‘the city is a vast monastery’, but he was not referring to his own Rotterdam, nor was he certainly foreshadowing the city as it is today, which for decades has been in the grip of a building frenzy reaching for the heavens and aspiring to overtake Amsterdam’s status as a leading tourist destination.

The strongly modernist identity of this ‘Manhattan on the Meuse’, with its voracious appetite for the future, rests, however, on the ruins of its recent past. ‘After all,’ states the Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas with a paradox, ‘it is thanks to the Nazis that Rotterdam is what it is.’ And here a historical explanation is needed. On 14 May 1940, during the infamous Rotterdam Blitz, the Nazis bombed the city, almost by mistake: of the two Luftwaffe squadrons sent into the skies over the Netherlands, the first managed to return in time, having heard over the radio that the Netherlands had surrendered; the second did not. And so, within a matter of minutes, the bombs razed the precious medieval centre of Erasmus’s city to the ground, claiming hundreds of lives, destroying more than 25,000 homes, 13 hospitals, 24 churches, 4 stations, and so on, leaving 80,000 people homeless. Just four days later, the tenacious people of Rotterdam – accustomed to braving the millennia-old waves of the North Sea head-on – began to consider what to build on that grey sea of ruins: should they rebuild everything exactly as it was before, or forge new paths? Not without some tension, they chose to leave the past behind and explore the future. It was precisely in that Schumpeterian storm—transposed into urban planning—that Rotterdam’s destiny as Europe’s architectural Mecca, a hotbed of countless projects, was forged. It was there that the city’s almost metamorphic nature took shape: every time you return, you find it enriched with new colossal buildings and bustling with new projects. Here, in the city of Europe’s first skyscraper, the Wittehuis, the White House (1898, an Art Nouveau gem), I discovered – after a few years’ absence – the Fenix, the Museum of Migration: a colossal disused warehouse converted into a cultural space. At the top of the building stands the so-called ‘Tornado’, the polished steel structure leading up to the terrace. All designed by the international practice MAD, led by architect Ma Yansong, a protégé of Zaha Hadid. And here, at last, we come to a significant Italian presence: Andrea D’Antrassi, aged 44, a student of Botta and Fuksas, was deeply involved in the iconic Fenix and spoke about it in Rotterdam at the Utopian Hours Festival, a regular gathering of architects. D’Antrassi is also head of the European branch of the young and renowned MAD (one is amazed when looking at the projects already completed or under construction), a team of 40 architects based in Ostiense. Why did he choose Rome, rather than Milan or London, Rotterdam or Madrid? “I firmly believe that Rome, despite Italian bureaucracy and the legitimately conservative attitude towards urban planning, offers excellent prospects. It is a city that is less saturated in urban terms than those you mentioned, and there is also a great deal to regenerate.” Rome is setting its sights on Rotterdam.