The Rotterdam is an enormous building with four main functions, roughly divided in offices, hotel, living, leisure and parking. It is not tailor-made but can theoretically accommodate a multitude of different businesses, which design their own interiors. Windows run from floor to ceiling and only on the west side the apartments have balconies, to profit optimally from the ever changing spectacular views of the Rotterdam harbour, the North Sea, spectacular sunsets and at night the continuous movement of the container terminals. The original design for the Rotterdam from 1998 also contained a multiplex cinema in the plinth and the facades were more differentiated than today. What is striking about the building is the overall impression of blankness. It is so blank, that it isn’t even enigmatic any more. It is not spectacular either, despite its size. It just sits there.
That does not mean The Rotterdam is uninteresting but rather that it unfolds in time, visually when one drives around it, or when the weather and light conditions change. The Rotterdam is so big, that one can see it already from afar, from outside Rotterdam, and because it stands in its very centre, one’s eye is always oriented towards it. It reminds me of the Federal Building on Wilshire in Los Angeles, an equally blank office building with a curtain façade from 1969 that one circles around driving on the nearby freeways. Depending on where you are it constantly changes its guises, for example at night, when just a few floors are lit here and there in the building. It may be that the intricacy of the Federal Building is partly caused by the fact that it was built incorrectly. It should have been facing the freeway, but the architect –whose name I could not find- supposedly messed up the drawings and committed suicide. There is something similarly erratic in the composition of the blocks that form The Rotterdam. The upper parts have been shifted from their bases –apparently without system. In case of The Rotterdam it is clear though that this composition is studied, giving it a tension, which may relax itself when one moves around it because the slits in the building open up. The towers stand on a plinth, which forms a pedestal, emphasizing the idea that we are confronted with a serious composition here. In fact, it reminds of some post-minimal art, like the work of the Swiss artist Helmut Federle. At night, the façade turns into a largely blank screen, with some pixels backlit from behind and a giant ‘n’ projected on it from the other side of the river to mark the ‘nhow’ hotel, which would otherwise not be distinguishable from the rest of the building.
The restrained aesthetics of The Rotterdam suddenly fit seamlessly in a series of recent buildings by OMA, with which the office wants to distance itself from the hyperventilating madness of signature architecture as it has developed over the last decades. But even though one can observe changes, a certain blankness has been a continuous theme in the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA, in fact already since Koolhaas’ earliest confrontations with culture in the work of the Nulbeweging, the Dutch variant on the Zero movement, which defined a large part of the editorial board of De Haagse Post, the magazine where he began working in the early nineteen sixties as a journalist and layout assistant immediately after school. The work of Armando, for example: simple monochrome lacquered sheet metal paintings with a few carefully placed bolts or barbed wire on them. Armando’s manifesto ‚Een internationale primeur’ (An international scoop) summed up what the Nulbeweging stood for: „Not moralizing or interpreting (art-ificing) the reality, but intensifying it. Starting point: an uncompromising acceptance of reality.(…) Working method: isolating, annexing. Thus: authenticity. Not of the maker, but of the information. The artist who is no longer an artist, but a cold, rational eye“. In the same period, Koolhaas could see the work of artists like Yves Klein and other Nouveau Réalistes in his beloved Stedelijk Museum. But it was not just visual blankness Koolhaas was confronted with at the time. There was also the blankness of the architectural plans of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon: vast sectors that were supposed to be occupied by a wandering and thus constantly changing population, provisionally and playfully building ‘ambiances’ to temporarily dwell in like futuristic gypsies. Koolhaas did one of his first interviews with Constant in the Haagse Post in 1966, on the occasion of the artist presenting at the Biennale in Venice.
The issue of blankness is also present in some of Rem Koolhaas’ key texts, as they were published in S, M, L, XL in 1995, three years before the initial design for The Rotterdam: Imagining Nothingness (1985), Typical Plan (1993), The Generic City (1994) and Bigness (1994). Even if Koolhaas himself may be cautious not wanting to see his realized projects as mere illustrations of his theories, in this case it is hard to overlook the relationship between those and The Rotterdam. If they are not the programmatic background, they are at least an explanation. In terms of architecture, all of these texts are the celebration of a radical pragmatism by its products. Imagining Nothingness celebrates emptiness in a city, because “Where there is nothing, everything is possible”, and proposes the establishment of liberty zones. Typical Plan, the deep rectangular, empty plans of American office buildings, only disturbed by elevator shafts and toilets, as developed in the twentieth century, basically provides such liberty zones, as it “provides the multiple platforms of the 20th-century democracy”. It is like Constant’s sectors, a “relentlessly enabling, ennobling background”, but than one in which Junkspace is realized. In its celebration of anonymity, The Rotterdam is certainly generic. But most of all, The Rotterdam is about Bigness. Bigness is the sublime quality buildings acquire beyond a certain scale. Beyond that, Bigness does not only enable the typical plan and puts it into a context that, because all floors may have multiple different occupants and programs, elevates the project to something beyond the simple vision of the architect. Ideally, it becomes something like a gigantic beehive, an almost anarchist dynamic organization with unpredictable outcomes, in which all occupants are connected in multiple ways, with the elevator as a catalyst. Bigness also explains why there is no attempt to differentiate the volumes and the façade more: “In Bigness”, Koolhaas writes, “the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed: interior and exterior become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other –agent of disinformation- offering the city the apparent stability of an object.” In the way Bigness breaks with all kinds of expectations about architecture, it also breaks with its context. “It exists; at most, it coexists. Its context is fuck context.” This is indeed how one experiences The Rotterdam on the Kop van Zuid peninsula in the river Meuse. It is much bigger than the subsequent masterplans ever envisaged. The buildings surrounding it -a bad Piano tower, a cheap Foster, a weird and over-ambitious Mecanoo and a Siza caricature of an American art deco skyscraper- are reduced to desperate figurants. The Piano building adjacent to The Rotterdam, which with its leaning façade always was a bit awkward, now looks as if it has been pushed aside by the moloch and is falling over. The whole scene looks as if they are about to tear down these other buildings, which unfortunately won’t happen.
Rotterdam has a tradition of big buildings. After the city had been flattened in a German bombardment during the war, reconstruction started with large buildings offering spaces for wholesalers and smaller businesses, such as the Groothandelsgebouw by Hugh Maaskant next to the Central Station from 1953. Maaskant was the champion of this kind of buildings and also designed the office building OMA is housed in. How big these buildings may be, Maaskant always took care to divide his volumes or to achieve dramatic sculptural effects. They would never be as big and anonymous as the famous Chicago Merchandise Mart, for example, which he visited for inspiration.
Already in 1991, in a lecture for the Stichting Hoogbouw, a foundation that promoted high-rise buildings in the Netherlands, Koolhaas, invited as author of Delirious New York, emphasized that the difference between European and American skyscrapers is not so much their height but their depth, sometimes even taking up a whole block of the grid of Manhattan. The Rotterdam is not only a high, but also a deep building, taking up a whole block on the Kop van Zuid. In that sense, it is an American building that has landed in Rotterdam, on the former pier and next to the terminal building where the ships to New York used to leave. Even if it may not be an illustration of Koolhaas’ theories, The Rotterdam shows how theories as suggestions, digested by politicians and market parties, in the long run can create a situation in which they can be realized: by the person who presented the theories in the first place, or by someone else.
The problem with theories is also that in time they tend to become independent, solidify and even freeze. If the Rotterdam will really become such a wild and dynamic organization as Koolhaas predicts in Bigness remains to be seen as, apart from the hotel and the apartments, a large part of it is occupied by one organization: the department of city planners and engineers of the city of Rotterdam. After a drastic reduction of staff they moved there from three giant towers by SOM in the periphery of the city from the nineteen seventies, thus enabling the realization of The Rotterdam but also adding up even more square meters to the huge existing vacancy in Rotterdam. Therefore I am afraid The Rotterdam will never become the pressure cooker similar to big buildings in New York could be, simply because there is no similar pressure on the real estate market. For the Kop van Zuid and Rotterdam it is a great pity that the cinema is missing. This could not only have made The Rotterdam itself livelier and more glamorous, it could have made the street livelier. With the first floors being a parking garage and only the hotel reception on the street, The Rotterdam reminds of other American examples than the ones from New York, in downtown Houston for example, where the skyscrapers have no relationship with the street whatsoever. The way the parking is present in the atrium, through glass walls, suggests that, similarly to Houston, this is the most important entrance to the building, which thus has nothing to do with the traditional public space in a European city. Without the context of a culture of congestion as it is present in New York, a theory celebrating radical pragmatism by its outcomes risks putting the chart in front of the horse. In that case we do not speak about blank as in a blank canvas, but about blank as in a blank.
Bart Lootsma