In some ways Rotterdam is the most American of Dutch cities (photo Philipsen)

In the previous blog about transportation in Rotterdam I touched on Rotterdam's devastating bombing in a Nazi Germany air raid that turned much of historic Rotterdam into rubble and cost over 700 lives in a single night and how the city planners have turned this tragedy into an opportunity of re-invention and development that came in various phases. The start from an almost blank slate sets Rotterdam apart from its historic neighbors of Delft, Utrecht and Amsterdam, even though these cities together along with Den Haag form a metropolitan crescent called Randstad. (the Randstad explanation also includes a wonderful little video explaining the difference between Holland and The Netherlands). 

Rotterdam rose like a phoenix from the ashes of WWII, still, it wasn't always known for design, innovation and intriguing architecture. Its gritty industrial post-war pathway towards an auto-centric city was too pragmatic to focus on beauty.  Yes, the pedestrian mall as invented here along the way

Lijnbaan 1953: The first pedestrian mall (archive photo)

(Lijnbaan), but  as many cities at that time, the city also bled out towards the suburbs and followed the principles of the CIAM congress of modernist urbanism and its strict division of functions, losing urban vitality in the process. Rotterdam had the world's largest port and significant ship-building industry and with the planning history of the modernist architect Hendrik Berlage, it also had managed urban expansion plans just as the other cities in the Randstad. resulting a much more organized regional growth than we typically see in the US. 

For Berlage, the quality of the public space was the nerve centre of his design. Streets and spaces came first, and only then the buildings. He thus introduced a fantastic urban system, highly flexible, and with public space as the backbone. (Public Space and Placemaking in NL)

Planners in Rotterdam understood that the auto-centric city focussed on industry was a dead-end and invested heavily in reusing vacated industrial lands and turning the wide boulevards into valuable common space for people. In a way that was a return to the placemaking principles of Berlage. Rotterdam brought housing back to the urban core and in a creative adaptive reuse for its partly deserted industrial sectors, it tried to harness innovation. In this new phase of reinvention Rotterdam began to brand itself as a city of architecture and sustainability. Current place-making strategies Rotterdam try to combine protection from climate hazards with the creation of socially vibrant places that contribute to quality of life and increase social cohesion. An early example is Waterplein Benthemplein, a gathering space that doubles up as a stormwater reservoir. 

"Rotterdam make it happen"- a new image for the city (photo: Philipsen)

With the global revival of cities and urbanity as a desired lifestyle, mono-functional city quarters and dependence on the automobile is increasingly in the rear view mirror, even though multilane high volume roadways are still present in some areas just outside downtown. Rotterdam's reversal is so intentional and progress so stunning that the city has become a destination for planners and architects who want to see best practices in urbanity, placemaking mixed use, revitalization, adaptive reuse, traffic calming and architecture.

Architecture

Traditionally, architecture is understood as an issue of esthetics and style, a view that is still prevalent in the way how Rotterdam's official website presents the topic of architecture:

The destruction of Rotterdam’s inner city in 1940 resulted in the patchwork of architectural styles that you encounter today. Here, icons of the Nieuwe Bouwen

Erasmus Bridge and De Rotterdam building in the background

style (Sonneveld House, Van Nelle Factory) and typical post-war architecture (Het Industriegebouw, Rotterdamsche Bank) dazzle alongside ultramodern residential towers (De Rotterdam, Zalmhaventoren and The CoolTower). It is this variety that tells the story of the city. The city where, on a stroll through the centre, you will also come across monuments such as the City Hall, the Laurenskerk and the Schielandshuis: relics of pre-war Rotterdam. And the 45-metre-high Witte Huis (White House), built in 1898 – Europe’s first skyscraper – also survived the bombing. The Markthal, next to the Laurenskerk, tells its own story and heralds a new era in Rotterdam. (Rotterdam website)

That Rotterdam includes architecture in its promotion and bills itself as the city of architecture says something about its values and its "branding". Style and esthetics do matter here. Still, architecture is now more than that. It has to address the challenges of today and the future, namely issue of social equity and climate change. Many of Rotterdam's architects understand that and the world took notice: Dezeen declared Rotterdam "the city of the future", Architizer used the same headline when it published a whole series of head-turning designs. PBS did a piece titled "How Rotterdam became a center of architectural experimentation" as part of its News Hour in 2019. 

MVDRV Markthal: A unique structure (Photo: Philipsen)

Our Baltimore-Rotterdam sister city visit took full advantage of Rotterdam as a center of world renowned architects with visits to the offices of OMA, MVDRV, Powerhouse Company, DoepelStrijkers. We toured  OMA's de Rotterdam towers, MVDRV's Markthal and Depot Boijmans van Beuningen and Powerhouse's" worldwide largest floating office building FOR and used the new railway station by Benthem Crouwel, MVSA and West 8.

Since our program had a special focus on sustainability we didn't leave it at celebrity architecture but also included visits to firms that make sustainability, innovation, and equity the center of their activity, such as Superuse Studios, GROUP A, de Urbanisten, Crimson's International New Town Institute, Elina Karanastasi's ExS architecture and Zico Lopes' firm Spatial Codes. 

The visits and discussions brought to light a "can-do" spirit of optimism and possibility that I would have typically associated with the US and not the Old World". As it stands, the "New World" better wake up if we want to keep up. 

This space isn't sufficient for a detailed discussion about all the firms or their projects. I will keep to a few key observations: 

New Building Types

Rotterdam has few buildings that were genuinely "invented" which can't be found anywhere else in the world since they are not just a creative style, shape or layout (such as Centraalstation and De Rotterdam) but an entirely new category of building type such as the Markthal (market hall) shaped by an apartment building as the envelope, the art collection storage of the Depot and the floating office building of Powerhouse. 

Powerhouse offices: The world's largest floating office building (Photo Philipsen)

Especially the floating office and the smaller floating little neighborhood in North Amsterdam are interesting responses to what may be helpful when contending with rising sea levels. Houseboats are a well known staple in Amsterdam, but the floating single family homes connected by wooden walkways reminiscent of boat docks are unique. By design and structure similar to houses built on land, they are different by having a floating concrete hull as a basement that acts as a weight and floating device at the same time, allowing them to remain stable in the water. The buildings are connected to the grid but also among each other with a smart grid fueled by solar panels on all the roofs. Efforts are underway for its own wastewater treatment facility.  It isn't entirely clear if these building types can scale up and whether they are useful in settings beyond the relatively still waters of inner harbor areas, but as a proof of concept, they provide valuable insights. 

As Powerhouse Company partner Albert Takashi Richters explained, the biggest challenge for Powerhouse's floating office wasn't that it would rock (it doesn't) but to balance it. Only well balanced can it stay level and glide nearly frictionless up and down on the two steel bollards that keep it in place and allow the tidal movements.

Potentially interesting is also Doepelstrijkers windmill building which created global headlines since 2015 but isn't actually built. As Duzan Doepel explained to our visiting group, the project has changed a lot from the beginning concept conceived over a beer. The catchy idea is still that this Dutch design would once again harness the wind for power, evoking the typical Dutch windmill which was used to

Model of a building that is designed to act like a windmill. (Photo Philipsen)

pump water out of low lying fields. It looks like the structure won't be realized first in Rotterdam but somewhere in the Emirates or possibly in Texas. Yet, the investigations in turning a building also into a wind-machine are ongoing among a large set of high caliber engineering firms. In this case is hard to tell what is hype and what reality.

Sustainability

A lot of presenters used the term circular economy, meaning that materials used for construction are either recycled or will be recycled after a building gets "deconstructed". Heavy timber construction now in en vogue worldwide, carries the promise that CO2 captured in timber will stay there if timber materials will be kept out of the waste stream for good. The promise of heavy timber carbon capture has a few unexplored spots as this article explains. The Powerhouse offices are constructed from heavy timber and for a floating structure this seems quite appropriate. It is all likely that this particular building won't wind up in a landfill. The floating office was further made sustainable by a large solar array on one side of the roof and a green sedum roof on the other. The array powered an air based heat pump which extracted heat from the submerged four concrete hulls which contained air at a stable 44F, cool enough in summer to provide efficient AC and warm enough in winter to extract enough heat even on very cold days.

Superuse Studios takes the approach of circularity to an altogether different level. The studio turns the design process upside down in that it doesn't design a building around a program and then wonders how it should be built but, instead, begins with the materials it has reclaimed and then see how a design can be derived from them. 

Community center made from chicken barn trusses (Superuse)

Superuse calls searching, finding and dismantling reusable building materials ‘harvesting’. For this purpose, Superuse founded the platform oogstkaart.nl in 2012. This marketplace for reusable building materials is used by Superuse as well as other architects, design professionals, builders and project developers.(Website)

In the case of decommissioned wind turbine wings they went as far as designing a program (a playground) and then find a client. In a very convincing design the studio designed a communal meeting space in Eindhoven (2020) around wood trusses recovered from demolished chicken barns. The office also designed entire structures with reused steel girders and other materials and claims that they achieved up to 84% recycled materials for their buildings (not counting possible the recycling content of new materials).  The decommissioned and dismantled wind turbines spun off  a separate business called Blade-Made.

GROUP A sits in Keilepand, a repurposed old concrete warehouse next to a filled-in dock which now is a zone for a community garden and De Urbanisten's experimental garden testing the concept of "sponge city".  GROUP A owns the warehouse which is a beehive of activities, including a brewery and the landscape architecture firm de Urbanisten which we also visited. GROUP A's Principal Maarten van Bremen and sustainable business development specialist Willem van Genugten focused their presentation to our group entirely on climate change and their material research think tank (CarbonLab) that fuels their international work which includes many speculative design competition entries.

Keilepand welcome graphic (Photo: Philipsen)

To face the challenge of our era GROUP A has launched CARBONLAB. This think tank investigates how we can reduce the CO2 footprint of our projects. The goal is to flip the coin and turn designs into carbon sinks: Climate Positive design, construction and living (website).

GROUP A's think tank, Superuse's material marketplace and Elina Karanastasi's Makerdam maker place and Zico Lopes' advocacy design leads me to another observation, that of architects moving outside their traditional lane of designing buildings.

Architects outside their lanes- the architecture of everything

"Maybe, architecture doesn't have to be stupid afterall. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything - a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.'
- Rem Koolhaas, AMO-OMA

Three of the firms we visited had their offices in a makerspace, Karanastasi and GROUP A  owned and managed the makerspaces as part of their business, both accommodating companies that were synergistic with theirs. Karanastasi is a real dynamo for business initiatives which included aside form designing house prototypes the partnerships in manufacturing them through prefabrication, as well as consulting to manage the Greek bureaucracy for investors who want to build there. In a sort of one-stop-shopping the inclusive services range from the design of the building to the construction of it and the getting the necessary permits. In her makerspace the Greek expat also had one of the more interesting tenants: Tools for Action, creative inflatables to be used in protests.

Superuse is part of an eco-system called BlueCity, an agglomeration of some 30 enterprises devoted to the circular economy. They repurposed the abandoned "swimming oasis Tropicana" beautifully located at the banks of the River Maas.

BlueCity: "Surfing the new economy"

At BlueCity we are building a world without waste. BlueCity is named BlueCity because we base our activities mostly on the principles of the blue economy: we work with local products, believe in cooperation instead of competition, and we create endless circles of value. We learn from nature. In nature there is no waste. Output for one is input for the other. We not only develop networks, we link them together towards an interwoven and unbreakable ecosystem. In everything we do, we keep our goals in mind: to continually innovate, create jobs, reduce waste by seeing waste as a valuable resource and building social capital without exhausting the environment. This is the new economy. (webpage)

Superuse turned the design process upside down with reuse of recycled material in its center. This approach brings with itself a comprehensive approach of design that includes material and construction from the get-go and may lead to situations where a product is completely designed before it finds a developer, investor or user. This approach is especially visible in Blade-Made. 

GROUP A's KeileCollectief is located in the M4H I Makers District, an aspirational designation of the City of Rotterdam. The architects first rented here and eventually bought the old warehouse which caters in a broader sense to the goals of this innovation district. In the long term, principal Maarten wants to achieve a circular economy inside the collective in which one firm's waste becomes the other's commodity.

Eco park by De Urbanisten (Photo: Philipsen)

The Makers District, comprising the areas of RDM Rotterdam and Merwe-Vierhavens (M4H), is the ideal location for new businesses to develop into established enterprises. 
It gives large companies the opportunity to experiment with new products and processes. Here, they can invent, test and implement new technologies. New technologies based on digitisation, robotisation, additive manufacturing and the application of new, sustainable energy and materials. Consequently, the Makers District is a testing ground and showcase for the new economy. Visible to everyone.(website)

But being part of a maker or innovation community isn't the only way of operating outside the traditional lanes of architecture: GROUP A's CarbonLab is  an example for research that only larger firms can afford, even if it is also still largely aspirational.

For everything a physical model: GROUP A (Photo: Philipsen)

With CARBONLAB we anticipate upcoming regulations and incentives. From sketch phase to user phase, we investigate how we can reduce the CO2 footprint of our design proposals. The goal is to flip the coin and turn designs into carbon sinks: Climate Positive design, construction and living. Using CO2 reduction and storage as a benchmark results in possibilities for responsible construction, regeneration of ecosystems and new business models. With an integrated view on the CO2 component of projects we can motivate clients to make fundamentally sustainable choices.

Starting as a think tank within GROUP A, CARBONLAB focuses on developing and applying knowledge of technologies, materials, (anticipating) regulations and incentives. Both internally and in collaboration with knowledge partners, in order to formulate project-driven solutions. GROUP A invites parties that share this mission and want to exchange knowledge and experience to contact CARBONLAB via carbonlab@groupa.nl.

One of the first architecture firms to create their own think tank was Rem Koolhaas OMA which called their research arm AMO. 

Entrance to OMA offices in Rotterdam (Photo Philipsen)

Zico Lopes in his Spatial Codes studio told us over snacks the story of community-based re-design of a rather stark and uninviting open space right around the corner from his office. The resulting design is

Tools for Action: Inflatable mirror barrier  (Photo: Philipsen)

not funded or accepted yet by the parks department of the city, but with his approach the architect achieved a precious consensus in a community that counts among the less fortunate in the city and which is suspicious about gentrification and top down government plans. Outreach and consensus are precious goods in today's fractured societies. Achieving it can be an architectural service.

In Zico's neighborhood Bospolder Tussendijken many buildings are post war reconstruction and are not well insulated, i.e. poorly suited for electric heat-pumps. In recognition of this situation, the city of Rotterdam has picked the neighborhood as a pilot for various programs including the expansion of the district heating network which is fueled by recovered waste heat from the port. The project will be quite impactful when all streets have to be dug up and landlords or residents have to throw out their old gas fired furnaces with the help of public funds for the conversion. In terms of sustainability, it is interesting to know the large CO2 footprint of the port itself and the fact that the waste heat would come from two new massive power plants fueled b coal(!) Initial plans to combine the

Housing in Bospolder, Rotterdam (Photo: Philipsen)

construction of those CO2 intensive plants with carbon capture technology have hit several snags. The port which is by far the largest emitter in the Netherlands is also the industrial engine of the country, in that Rotterdam is an illustrative example for any nation that hasn't written its industry entirely off. But that would be for another article. 

Roofgarden

Atrium

View into spaces from the atrium

reflecting the surrounding buildings

Tally of the stored items in the lobby

View into storage area (small items)