ROTTERDAM, October 17 -- Imagine this: You wake up, shake last night’s dream away, stretch, and then look out the window, only to be greeted by a giant snail hiding behind a mushroom. Or, perhaps you spy a massive raspberry, shrimp and flower.
Not only does Rotterdam long for even half the tourists that flock to Amsterdam (only 80 kilometres away), the historic city centre continues to work hard at shedding its 1980s reputation as one of the “drug hot spots of Europe” in order to rebrand itself as a safe, fun destination middle-class folk will live in, and, especially, shop in: “Because the Dutch people are not used to markets, there was this idea that this market needed to be bigger, but then it became a financial issue – how do we create a big building that is a market, but with the low rents that [vendors] will pay for the market-stalls?” To complicate matters, the city’s 2004 competition brief called for rental apartments, condominiums and a significant number of parking spaces (1,200) as well as an enclosed market to complement the open-air one nearby. Eschewing the typical scheme of creating a separate building for each function, MVRDV’s solution rolled these requirements into one big architectural croquette, so the walls of the market itself contain the housing units, and all parking and loading is done underground and out of sight. This novel approach took first place for the Rotterdam-based architecture firm, established in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. In addition to the 96 food stalls and 20 retail units on the 43,000-square-foot ground floor (for comparison, Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market is 50,000 square feet according to ERA Architects), Markthal also boasts a full grocery store on the lower level, a flexible “edutainment” space, and yet another art installation beside the escalators titled “The Time Stair,” where the deeper one descends, the more one learns of the site’s history via archeological artifacts found during excavation, video, and sound.
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