Rem Koolhaas called De Rotterdam 'a vertical city' in 2013, when the 'largest multifunctional building in the Benelux' was completed in Rotterdam. Because in the colossus on the Maas designed by his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), living, working and recreation are brought together on an unprecedented scale, Koolhaas thought. Behind the monotonous, largely glass facades of the three 149-meter-high towers are not only 240 homes and a hotel with 285 rooms, but also office spaces that cover almost half of the total floor area of 160,000 square meters. The six-storey base, on which the towers stand like precariously stacked giant boxes, includes a large parking garage, several lobbies and three restaurants.
“Sober and subtle, a building that does not simply radiate egoism,” Koolhaas judged about De Rotterdam in an article on Architectweb. He also explained that the building was named after the 1959 steamship Rotterdam, the flagship of the Holland-America Line, which was taken out of service in 2000: you could see the Rotterdam as an upright cruise ship, Koolhaas said about the naming. Just as De Rotterdam is a 'vertical city', the ss Rotterdam with its hundreds of cabins, restaurants, theaters and other facilities was a 'horizontal city'.
Cities under one roof
Yet it is not the ss Rotterdam that gave the architects of OMA the idea for De Rotterdam. The vertical city is an invention of the American architect Raymond Hood (1881-1934), the hero of the book Delirious New York with which Koolhaas made a name for himself in 1978. After Hood built several office towers in New York a century ago, he found that the city's growth was getting out of hand, Koolhaas writes in his book about Manhattan in the interwar period. The construction of even more skyscrapers would lead to the 'congestion' of Manhattan, Hood predicted in 1931. To prevent the clogging and suffocation of the heart of New York, he proposed the construction of Cities under a Single Roof, huge buildings housing apartments, shops, clubs, theaters and offices and so on. If office clerks and their bosses live, work and recreate in one building, many time-consuming trips are unnecessary, Hood reasoned.
Real cities under one roof have never been built in New York. Closest to one City under a Single Roof comes Rockefeller Center, the gigantic complex in the middle of Manhattan, including office and residential towers, shops, cafes and restaurants and a theater with 6,000 seats.
Koolhaas describes in detail Delirious New York the difficult creation of Rockefeller Center, which was designed by an extensive team of architects led by Hood. “The most pronounced form of Manhattanism and the culture of congestion,” he calls the Art Deco complex, which was only completed in 1940.
The construction of De Rotterdam also took a long time. The design was ready in 1997, but for a long time the project developers did not dare to tackle the vertical city. Only when the municipality of Rotterdam decided to rent a large part of the office spaces in 2008 could construction begin.
Photos Flip Franssen
Gloomy gallery
Now, more than ten years after the commissioning of De Rotterdam, it must be established that the approximately 4,500 people who work there do not cause anything resembling 'congestion'. On a gray weekday winter day it is quiet in the large, high main lobby. Only a few people sit at work tables or in the seats on the shiny black natural stone floor. The Aqua Asia Club on the Maas side, which should be open according to the 'lounge restaurant' website, is closed. It is also empty and dark in the Ketelbinkie restaurant on the street side, accessible via a sad gallery with a cheap glass facade on one side and concrete columns on the other.
It is also extremely quiet on the escalators in the main lobby. There is not much to do on the top floors of the Rotterdam substructure. The escalators lead to the immense parking garage and a small lobby of one of the two office towers that are only accessible to those who work there.
The residents of the apartments and the guests in the Nhow Hotel do not cause any commotion either. The lobby of the Nhow Hotel is adjacent to the main lobby, but that of the apartment tower has a shabby, 'electric' entrance door on the outer gallery that can only be opened by residents and the receptionist.
For example, De Rotterdam has not become the vibrant Rotterdam Rockefeller Center that 'lives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week', as stated on the vertical city's website. The explanation is simple: despite its enormous size, the glass rock of De Rotterdam is not a vertical city at all. An attractive city like Paris has good public spaces in the form of beautiful squares and pleasant streets that lead from one destination to another.
But the only square of De Rotterdam is an uncanny lobby in the basement where there is little to do and from which 'streets' in the form of escalators lead to desolate parking garages. Moreover, not only the office towers but also the residential tower are private areas. The residents of De Rotterdam do not live in a lively city, but in a dead vertical one gated communitywhich in fact every residential tower is.
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