Markthal Rotterdam, MVRDV architecten

‘You can’t use the word provocative after 9/11’, reckons Winy Maas. It could suggest architecture as incitement to violence or discord. But in a ‘positive sense’, he accepts that MVRDV’s covered market for Rotterdam is exactly that: a provocation about scale, about contextuality, about food culture and how we live.

It is also about bringing vitality back to central Rotterdam − a painfully slow process that must address the blitz of May 1940 that saw only 12 city-centre buildings survive the subsequent firestorm, clearances and the zoning of the post-war rebuilding that helped depopulate the inner city.

Visit today and Rotterdam, a municipality with a population of 618,000 is still curiously quiet, especially after dark. Lamps glow in apartment windows and some restaurants are busy but the streets are empty. Life has been dispersed and what remains is in what Maas calls a ‘city of spots’; areas such as the pre-war survivors Witte de Withstraat and Delfshaven where something of the city’s earlier vigour survives − if muted. Some locals put it down to Rotterdam’s working-class, nose-to-the-grindstone culture (Rotterdammers, it is said, buy their shirts with the sleeves already rolled up)......Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review