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Rem Koolhaas's De Rotterdam: cut and paste

architecture
Like one skyline perched on another, the latest mega-building by Rem Koolhaas
towers over the starchitect playground of Rotterdam. But why was it even built?
Oliver Wainwright gets a guided tour

Oliver Wainwright
Monday 18 November 2013 07.00GMT

I
f you put the last 50 years of architecture in a blender, and spat it out in
building-sized chunks across the skyline, you would probably end up
with something that looked a bit like Rotterdam. Walking the streets of
the Netherlands' second-largest city is like trawling a back catalogue of
architects' bold dreams and daring attempts. There are buildings shaped
like sharpened pencils and forests of oating cubes, towers dressed in
bright red pinstripes and blue harlequin chequers, odd lumps and
improbable cantilevers thrusting out in all directions. All this is the
consequence of the city suering a bombardment of two things: bombs and
architects. Rotterdam was attened by the Luftwae during the second
world war and has since served as a hotbed of experimentation, becoming a
natural home for the country's architectural avant garde. Since the
construction of Europe's rst pedestrian shopping zone here in 1953, an
idea imported from the US along with kiosks in the shape of oranges and
hot dogs, the city has thrived on promiscuous sampling. It is a jumble of
bits and pieces, full of echoes of elsewhere, giving the overall impression of
paper-thin surfaces held together in an energetic collage.

Now the country's most celebrated architect, Rem Koolhaas, has just
completed the nation's largest building here, and one of the biggest in
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Europe. It is a gleaming beacon of prosperity, a monument to Rotterdam's

rude economic health built at a time when scores of such oce blocks lie
vacant across the city.

Given the implausible context, DeRotterdam seems appropriately unreal, a

dreamlike stage set of nancial capital that takes the city's cut-and-paste
urbanism to the next extreme. Filling a hefty chunk of the southern skyline,
at 150 metres tall and more than 100 metres wide, DeRotterdam looks like
someone has sliced up the drawings and stuck them on the horizon but
not put the pieces back together quite right.

Four simple oce blocks rise from an elevated podium, only to be cut in
half and shued up in the wrong order, like a game of architectural Mists.
The resulting form is of a skyline perched precariously on top of another
skyline, each block resting on the shoulder of the next in a staggered
huddle. The entire thing is clad in a continuous surface of slender
aluminium mullions from top to bottom, which shimmer like silvery
corduroy, recalling New York skyscrapers of the 1960s. It could be the twin
towers of the World Trade Center, resurrected in a Frankenstein muddle.

Manhattanism brought back to the hometown ... De

Rotterdam. Photograph: Ossip Van Duivenbode
Photograph: Ossip Van Duivenbode

In the headquarters of Koolhaas's Oce for Metropolitan Architecture (now

simply OMA), to the north of the city, where armies of bleary-eyed interns
are summoning mysterious shapes from blocks of blue Styrofoam, there is a
mild panic of public relations staers. Rem has arrived, and overturned
their plans: he wants to drive me to the building himself.

"This is our longest-running project," he says, awkwardly folding his tall

frame into the bucket seat of his black BMW sports car, as his assistants
scramble into a car behind. "It began in 1997, but it only became possible to
build it during the nancial crisis when the contractors were cheap
enough to do it."

A literal product of the recession, this sharply tailored corporate leviathan is

conceived as a "vertical city", housing not just 70,000 sq m of oce space,
but 240 apartments in the block to the west, and a 285-room boutique hotel
in the block to the east, sitting on a chunky plinth of conference facilities,
car parking and restaurants. It is the latest 340m (285m) part of
"Manhattan on the Maas," a vision launched in the early 1990s to transform
the Wilhelminapier, a little spit of land on the south bank of the River Maas,
into something resembling New York if you squint a bit.

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As we roar through the city centre at ferocious speed, the site comes into
view. In among the majestic old brick warehouses of the shipping trade now
stands a brash collection of starchitects' castos. There is a squarish stone
shaft by Alvaro Siza, an irregular stack of coloured blocks by Mecanoo, a
glowering grey hulk by Norman Foster and a convoluted assemblage by
Renzo Piano, complete with a leaning wall of LEDs. With blocks of childlike
simplicity, wrapped in a sleek skin of delicate ribs, Koolhaas's oering rises
above the surrounding din with cool authority. He may be last to the party,
but this contribution is bigger and more sophisticated than them all.

"The most important thing about this project is your perception of its size
and mass as you drive over the bridge," says Koolhaas, hunched over the
wheel, his frail voice barely audible above the roar of the engine, as we
begin our ascent of the boomerang-shaped road of the Erasmus Bridge. "We
calculated how the view would change as you approach along this curving
path."

When you rst see it on the horizon, the building seems scale-less. It could
be a miniature model or a massive mountain, the blocks slipping and sliding
past each other with no recognisable sense of proportion. It looks utterly
surreal, glimmering like amirage in the low winter sun.

It is an eect Koolhaas has been pondering since 1979, when he designed

an unrealised scheme for the other side of the river, predicated on the same
idea of a wall of shuing blocks. "Any structure will be noted in passing, at
bewilderingly dierent speeds and angles," he wrote of the riverside
Boompjes site, a few hundred metres to the northeast. By slicing the blocks
up, he continued, "the slits between the towers deliver more than
openness; the experience of passing the slab shows stroboscopic ashes of
the city". With characteristic certainty, he concluded that this eect created
"an accordion movement that made the composition of 'towerslab'
innitely dynamic".

More than 30 years later, and after 16years of development (De Rotterdam
began in 1997, but has stopped and started ever since), Koolhaas's dynamic
"towerslab" has now been realised. But is it anything more than an optical
trick, a game of dancing facades best viewed from a distance? "That's all
you need to see. The rest is just a cheap oce building," he says, before
leaving me to explore the interior for myself.

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'Vertical living' ... De Rotterdam. Photograph: Ossip

Van Duivenbode Photograph: Ossip Van Duivenbode

Like other recent mega-projects by OMA, such as the Shenzhen Stock

Exchange, most eort has gone into composing a beguiling envelope,
leaving the interior to prosaic commercial realities. There are some
attempts within the gargantuan oors to choreograph moments of drama
and intrigue. You enter into a lofty lobby space, where banks of escalators
rise through a seven-storey atrium, past glazed walls of car parking a
grittiness that jars nicely with the world of silver marble below.

In places, the eect of having chunks of the building stick out up to eight
metres makes itself felt: vast concrete trusses march across the oor,
forming great structural V's and W's. Earlier designs made a bigger show of
this zig-zag construction on the facade, but cost-cutting reduced structure
to the essential, rather than theatrical.

The apartments which will be some of the most expensive in the city
oer spectacular views, but as you might imagine, they feel a little like
living in an oce, staring out through those densely spaced mullions. The
novelty of "vertical city" living, where you get out of bed only six metres
away from someone at a desk, might wear o fairly quickly, too.

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Frankenstein muddle ... De Rotterdam. Photograph:

Ossip Van Duivenbode Photograph: Ossip Van
Duivenbode

It is too early to tell how this Goliath will function when its oors have been
lled, but there remains a strong sense of uncertainty as to who or what will
occupy this ample acreage. A speculative building initiated by a private
developer, it only went ahead when the municipal government agreed to
rent a substantial chunk of the oce space. In doing so, it will vacate two
other towers to the west of the city, designed by SOM in the 70s, which it
rescued in the same way when the real estate market crashed in 1976. As
history repeats itself, so continues the vicious cycle of speculation,
developers cheered on and bailed out by the government, thirsty for the
next iconic project that will bring the magic fairy-dust of inward
investment. Orwill it?

"The building is a cynical and brutal monument to the city's delusions of

grandeur," says Wouter Vanstiphout, professor of design and politics at
Delft university. "While Amsterdam is trying to ll its empty oces,
Rotterdam is building more and more, but there's no one to go in them. It is
madness when there is 30% vacancy across the city it follows the same
logic as saying, 'Let's build houses, because we need morepeople.'"

I put this to Koolhaas, but he shrugs it o. "It's the same across Europe," he
says, batting away the idea that he might be fuelling the city's vanity.
"Buildings aren't empty for ever, and we've designed this to accommodate
any amount of change."

For him, De Rotterdam is the culmination of a more personal story. It

represents the realisation of a decades-long xation with the thrilling
hyper-density of "Manhattanism", rst cultivated in his student manifesto,
Delirious New York. At the age of 68, he has nally brought back a contorted
slice of that city's vertiginous madness to his home town. There is a sense of
nostalgia in his voice as he drops me on the street corner, before driving o
to his next appointment. "The weird thing is that this building might look
cold or harsh, but we get grandmothers now writing to us saying they like it.
Which has never happened before."

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