Rotterdam is not afraid of big architectural gestures. While there are glimpses and moments of the historic city, the overwhelming form of the place is shaped by grand planning, landscape, and architectural gestures that have followed the widespread destruction of the city by the Luftwaffe over 1940. The loss of such heritage and continuous history of place was tragic, but Rotterdam was not a city to spend long in mourning for itself, and quickly looked to how a utopian city of the future may emerge from the debris.

Exhibitions including Rotterdam in the Near Future, The City on the Maas Gets Back on its Feet, and A City Rises Again, all between 1947 and 1950, started conversations around what could be, with recurring festivals and magazines continuing the conversation through to the 1970s whilst a new city began to form. The city we see now is a fantastic live urban experiment in form, infrastructure, and community. Some has worked, some less so, but it is thrilling and at every corner there are fascinating aesthetic clashes and surprises.




It is not a city that shies away from large gestural statements. It is the city of Piet Blom’s 1972 bright yellow, tilted cube houses lifted up into the sky, of UNStudio’s 150m tall bent-concrete pylon holding up Erasmus Brug across the Nieuwe Maas river, and of landscape architect West 8’s Schouwburgplein public square with four enormous red spotlight-wielding cranes that can be manoeuvred by the public.

Since the millennium, those gestural statements have only increased in scale and impact, though with arguably mixed results architecturally. The Markethal, by MVRDV has perhaps grabbed recent headlines – a food market hall largely for tourists, enclosed with a vast arch of residential apartments is neither subtle nor particularly interesting. But it is big and has a shape that can be used on city branding and Instagram.

The 1996 opening of the Erasmus Brug opened the city centre docklands for regeneration and development, fronted by De Rotterdam, a dense OMA-designed lump of spatial massing, finished in 2013 and now acting as an aggressive obstruction along the riverside edge of. With neighbouring towers by Álvaro Siza, Renzo Piano, and Norman Foster further along the Wilhelminapier peninsula, it can be seen as a staging post of a southwards-heading landgrab by developers reaching into the former industrial landscape. Culture – as always and for both good and bad – leads that movement.




Recently, the Fenix museum of migration opened in a vast concrete warehouse, bedecked by a viewing platform perched above a vortex of steps, all in look-at-me shining silver. Designed by MAD Studio, the museum marked the next step into the docks, a landmark cultural instution in the middle of the Katendrecht peninsula, until not that long ago Europe’s largest red-light district but now increasingly a destination for gastrophiles, buyers of warehouse-living apartments, and sellers of designer furniture. Fenix, with its irksomely silly but determinedly photographable gestural spiral put the peninsula onto the global map – at least in Instagram.

Into this comes Rotterdam’s newest cultural architecture, the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Like Fenix, and countless other institutions before, it cuckoos itself inside an empty industrial shell, that of the Santos warehouse, originally used to offload coffee shipped from Brazil, latterly used for storage of other goods, and then for many years sitting empty. A handsome 1902 Beaux-Arts building, Santos looks solid but in a changing city was at risk until thankfully registered as a national monument in 2000, and has remained in place as Katendrecht began to take its new shape around it.




It has been carefully reimagined from storage of stuff to storage of photography (oldest analogue to newest digital) by WDJARCHITECTEN and RENNER HAINKE WIRTH ZIRN ARCHITEKTEN, two female-led architectural firms. While their capslocked names is shouty and aggressive, their treatment of the Santos is anything but – a determinedly lower-case, soft, non-intrusive, considered, and careful reconfiguration.

Stripped back to its core surfaces and materials, the ground floor is now kept as a largely open space. With an entrance on both sides, to futureproof the institution from shifting tectonics of future gentrification on neighbouring sites, visitors enter a welcoming ground floor holding the ticketing desk, a photobooth, and plenty of slack space for just hanging out.

The ground floor is also home to a generous public library, stacked with thousands of photo books, all grabbable, readable, and studyable by any member of the public who takes an interest – no membership, no gatekeeping. It will surely be a resource that will not only be devoured by researchers and writers, but also a younger generation to the history and creative potential of photography.




In the centre of the entrance floor is a mound of steps, a useful mound for events or just Rotterdammers hanging out in a new public space. Above it is the main architectural gesture, a central atrium cut from ground to roof letting light come down and expectant gaze look up. Into it, the architects have positioned a series of returning stairs, using minimal industrial materials to be both in-keeping though not pretending they are of the same time or aesthetic as the original ingredients. The visitor may not think much has happened to the internal form, and will likely miss the subtle interjection interjection of delicate reinforcements to the grid of steel columns that carry the load from top to bottom – new rooftop apartments (more on those below) increasing the historic building’s structural load.

The artworld romantically reimagines storage and warehousing as “archive”, but fundamentally they are similar things – museums need massive buildings that simply keep all the stuff, just as coffee producers needed a massive building to hold stuff in transition. A short walk from Fotomuseum is the Depot, designed by MVRDV in aesthetic honour of an upturned IKEA aluminium salad bowl. Acting as both art storage for Boijmans Van Beuningen museum as well as a public visitor experience, coupling exhibition spaces windowed glimpses into the stacks and shelves of artworks (and also the proposition that led to London’s V&A Storehouse, see 00270), it also presents as a vastly different approach to storage to that of the Fotomuseum.




The Fotomuseum’s storage for 6.5 million items connected to photography from 1839 to the present day, with all the associated environmental and technological systems required. While the mode and form of storage is different – the Santos only temporarily stored the coffee as it was carried by crane from boats through windows at all levels, then passed through the space and out windows the other side for distributiont – there’s a neat segue of function through the centuries, and as visitors flow up from ground floor to galleries they will pass by these storage levels. Windows offer glimpses in to stacks of stored items and conservator’s workshops alongside shifting displays and occasional tours to show the public the breadth and wealth beyond the few items on display.

Main display galleries fill three floors. The museum opens with the Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography, a permanent presentation covering nearly two centuries of the form. 99 works have been selected, from the sincerely iconic to others clearly selected for clickbait publicity, but it is a diverse presentation that includes some seminal works: a grid of 48 1939 Anne Frank passport photos reveal personalities of a girl so recognisable through only one of the set; Paul Citroen’s 1923 Metropolis collage, seminal to the history of modern city representation, sings; a late 19th century image of a giraffe carcass dangling upside down, attributed to Paul Steenhuiozen, is tragic in its telling of our relationship to fellow animals; a 1969 Vincent Mentzel image of spectators of a Feyenoord versus Ajax game shows differences and sameness over passing time; while images of Snoop Dog, Nick Cave, and Tupac Shakur are perhaps added more for headline hooks.




Dutch architecture and landscape is also covered in this hang, though it’s explored in great depth upstairs within an entire exhibition dedicated to the host city in Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – now, an exhibition we will be covering in more depth soon but alone is worth a recessed.space reader planning a trip.

The third gallery floor is given over to Awakening in Blue: An Ode to Cyanotype, a vast presentation dedicated to the medium. This could be dry, cold, and academic, but here is joyous and playful, supported with an excellently designed exhibition and superbly selected contemporary artists through which to explore the theme. Opening with original cyanotype architectural plans and elevations of the host building, the medium is explored richly – highlights including Anne Greene’s Idiotic miracles, tracing ants meanderings and the Blueware series of ceramic tiles made of London pavement weeds by Sarah can Gameren and Tim Simpson (making under the name Glithero).




The exhibition spaces are simple, and the architecture of the building simply offers the grid and boundary within which excellently designed scenography sits. The Santos’ external windows are small – not much light was needed for coffee storage – with occasional large openings at which cranes swung their cargo. Originally with little insulation, these have now had modern glazing added behind the original doors, but otherwise there is a glorious lack of tidying up – scratched in numbers, colourfield painting, and architectural scars act as palimpsests to a former life, enriching the current.

As visitors ascend the carved central void, they may notice the stairs subtly shift horizontally from one floor to the next. A delicate choreography to mark differences between existent history and inserted new – and a delicateness that is lacking at the culmination of the staircase and void. Above it all, above the soft interventions, above the culture, is a clunky golden crown that houses some privately rental apartments, wrapped within a metal meshwork that shouts the historical differential where everything else in the project was such careful kintsugi.




In postwar Rotterdam, the golden crown makes sense. It is a city that more than most others demands new architecture to offer a signature iconic moment to photographed, pointed at, recognised, and seen as a part of the modern reinvention. Architecturally, however, it offers little. Sure, it presents a very obvious statement to gentrifying Katendrecht that “this is new, this is shiny, this is a thing, this changes what was below”, the visual fight for attention away from the fine, robust architecture of the Santos warehouse is unhelpful.

When visiting, recessed.space was not able to access the apartments enclosed within the angular rooftop mesh, though the official images suggest that there is a prison-like feel to containment within the punctured steel panel façade. Even the ‘outside’ spaces of the flats seem somewhat inside, with no open views across the city, suggesting that the golden-crown was designed more with the distant placemaking view in mind than an experience within looking beyond.




Internally, the two spaces of the institution and the rentable-apartments on the roof, connect in a similarly clunky way. At the top of the void is a zigzag stair falling from the crown into the carefully carved internal spaces. It dominates the upwards view, and jars. It also means that every Fotomuseum visitor is reminded of the apartments above.

Perhaps, this literal reminder of the systems in which culture supports luxury real estate expansion is not a bad thing, but such a political statement was likely not the intent. As it stands, this statement stair will rarely be used, probably on the rare occasion apartment visitors want to get to the level below – the Fotomuseum bar and restaurant – for breakfast. That such an inconsequential part of the building’s programme has been awarded such an extravagant, gestural, and costly moment of architecture seems a strange decision, and one which does all the good work of the building below a disservice.




Thankfully, there is so much that is good – even great – with the building and its cultural offer below the crown that it does not take over, though it is a shame that both internally and externally this invasive flourish is so present. That said, compared to the silly spiral of Fenix, the grandiose arch of Markethal, the Boijmans salad bowl, as well as the many, many other increasingly annoying architectural gestures fighting for Rotterdammers’ attention, it is barely noticeable and perhaps even speaks to a softening of Rotterdam’s post-war form-finding. Yes, it shouts a lot, but it also shouts a lot less than other projects of the last two decades.

If so, Rotterdam has an exciting future. A city in which so much art, culture, and energy is present, and which has such a rich amalgam of architecture – from ‘traditional’ Dutch canalside townhouses to the 1930s Sonneveld House, and from proud postwar phoenixes-from-the-ashes as Piet Blom’s Cube Houses to the spatial urban-reimaginations to starchitect iconicism – a shift towards the subtle, ecological and considered would be a very welcome progression.

The Fotomuseum might sit at that shift. At its heart is a delicate, considered, and successful repurposing of the Santos warehouse to a new kind of storage, an archive for culture and photography. Above it, the crown, seems from a different time and function, awkward and unfortunate, speaking to recent Rotterdam rather than that which is hopefully to come.

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