ENROUTE TV   ENROUTE FM   MEDIA KIT   AIR CANADA   LINKS   WRITERS'   GUIDELINES	THE BIRTH OF THE KOOL In a country that’s pretty small, Rotterdam is a city that thinks big, thanks to audacious architecture by talents like famous local son Rem Koolhaas. Text: CHARLENE ROOKE The concierge has mistaken me for a jet-setter. I suppose it’s because I’m staying at the stylish Blakes hotel, tucked into a cobblestone courtyard on one of Amsterdam’s more fashionable canals. Equipped for the chic international set, it has everything from a sexy lounge to a post-party canister of oxygen in the mini-bar -selection. After recommending a restaurant for my last night in town, the concierge asks, "So where are you off to next – Paris, Rome?" "Rotterdam," I answer truthfully, not realizing the effect it will have on this discreet arbiter of cool. His face freezes; he looks momentarily betrayed. I suppress a giggle as the concierge recovers and recommends a Rotterdam nightclub. "I’ve heard it’s good," he says, almost apologetically, "but I don’t get out there that often." Less than an hour away by train, but apparently a world apart, Rotterdam is part of the "ring city" of municipalities that skirts the cosmopolitan Dutch capital. But lately, Rotterdam has been generating an international buzz of its own – one that goes beyond the wooden-shoes-and-windmills circuit, thanks to audacious modern architectural creations by, among others, Rotterdam native Rem Koolhaas. I’m interested in the architecture, but even more intrigued by why it’s here in Rotterdam. Sure, it’s the largest port in the world, but until recently, its international image has been that of a working-class city in a pocket-size European country. And yet its architectural profile is no accident or tourism gimmick but the deliberate effect of innovative urban planning since 1940, when most of its downtown was levelled by German bombs. Since then, a steady stream of architectural talent, fed by the nearby Delft University of Technology, has injected ingenuity into the rebuilding campaign. As the youngest and most ethnically diverse city in Holland, Rotterdam is currently a hotbed for everything from visual arts to techno music. It was named a Cultural Capital of Europe in 2001 and is currently hosting the prestigious International Architecture Biennale. Is this just a city of modern buildings, I wonder, or a truly modern city with attitudes, practices and people to match? My first glimpse of Rotterdam’s constructed legacy appears in the east windows of the train: the Van Nelle factory on the city’s outskirts. The dramatic curving steel and glass facade belies its pedestrian origins as a coffee, tea and tobacco packaging factory, albeit one that was progressive for its time, providing plenty of natural light and fresh air for workers. (It now holds new media offices.) An example of the Nieuwe Bouwen (new building) architectural movement that began to flourish in Holland around 1920, it looks like an icon of mid-century modernism, yet was completed in 1931. I’m staying at the most idiosyncratic four-star hotel I’ve ever visited. The Hotel New York, in the former Holland America shipping line headquarters, was the first business to see the potential 10 years ago of the Wilhelmena docklands, a formerly forsaken peninsula jutting out into the Maas river. (A fleet of water taxis conveniently zips hotel guests across to downtown Rotterdam.) The staff wears efficient white lab coats, the signs are hand-doodled and the copper-domed towers fly jaunty pennants. The 100-year-old building has an almost comically classic charm compared to the rest of the Rotterdam skyline, where primary colours, geometric shapes and unexpected constructions appear like a child’s Lego fantasies rudely plopped in the middle of a model European city. Dominated by the elegant bone-white mast suspending the stunningly lit Erasmusbrug (bridge), my first night view of the skyline is both curious and thrilling. Over the next few days, I get several more visual jolts while exploring the Kop van Zuid neighbourhood around the hotel, where forward-thinking housing and office developments have been popping up since the bridge blazed a city-centre axis across the river in 1996. The candy-apple red slab of the Luxor Theater faces off against the KPN tower, which cleverly appears to be propped up by a slim 45-metre column (even more clever because architect Renzo Piano was born near Pisa). A little further along, the riverbank is studded with a series of gigantic mushroom caps – sculptures conceived by architect Peter Wilson that fancifully allude to ships’ tethering posts. I get a little insight into the Dutch character and aesthetic as I take in some local sights with Peter Melville, a trained architect turned guide and translator. As we approach the KPN building, with flashing green lights forming patterns and messages on the facade, I remark that I find it amusing. Melville withholds comment, in admirably tolerant Dutch form, but leads me around to the building’s empty front plaza, so wind-whipped on this day that I’m forced to lean at nearly the same angle as the tower. "The people who live there," he says, pointing to a large condo complex across the river, "are perhaps not so pleased when these lights flash in their windows every morning." Similarly, I fall in love at first sight with the Kunsthal (art hall), Rem Koolhaas’ signature building on the quadlike Museumpark. It’s a low, linear exhibition space that uses a sloping ramp to connect the elevated road it faces (a former dike) with the green space of the park behind. The design seems brilliant to me until Melville tactfully suggests some might find the ramp entrance inaccessible. I experience that design flaw first-hand a few days later as I jostle with hundreds of -chattering Dutch school kids to enter through one narrow door. Later, at the Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, I discover that Nieuwe Bouwen is also known as functionalism for its socially conscious, extremely practical aesthetic. I begin to appreciate this cultural preference for function over form when I visit Piet Blom’s famed Kijk-Kubus (cube houses), an enchanted forest of live-work spaces sheltering a central courtyard. Although the canary-yellow exteriors are irresistible, an interior tour reveals impractical odd-shaped rooms with sloped walls. If much of Rotterdam’s experimental new architecture is decidedly impractical, with looks only tourists can love, what’s the impetus for this bold building drive? I ask an accomplished urban planner responsible for a large chunk of urban Holland, one who has sailed on Starck’s yacht (Philippe, that is) and shared cocktails with Calatrava (Santiago, he calls him). He looks at me as if the answer should be self-evident: "Because architecture improves the quality of life and gives people a sense of pride in living there," he says with conviction. Delicately, I mention that most of the Rotterdammers I’ve talked to seem to prefer traditional to modern architecture. He laughs ruefully. "Architects, designers and planners – we are all snobs about modern architecture, yet we all live in very old houses." Indeed, the best parts of Rotterdam are found in the spaces between the showy new buildings. More intimate streets, like the Witte de Withstraat, are full of funky little boutiques, unusual galleries and smoky cafés. Rosy-cheeked shoppers crowd lively streets like the Linjbaan (an outdoor pedestrian mall and a prototype for the modern shopping centre) and the Beursplein. I’m struck by the overall design consciousness here, in sharp contrast to the cheap plastic aesthetic of North America. I see it everywhere, from the unique utensil used to flip the poffertjes pancakes you buy on the street to the clever self-cleaning toilet seats in the Hema department store. The city’s most popular place to eat Dutch apple cake is named for the building’s architect, W.M. Dudok. Another coffeehouse, Café de Unie, was actually rebuilt several years ago because its facade was a singular lost example of the de Stijl movement. The more time I spend wandering around the city, the more something Peter Melville said seems exactly right. We had been standing on the top floor of the Westelijk Handelsterrein, two old brick warehouses linked by an atrium and converted into wonderful galleries and hip restaurants. When I said I admired the chic downstairs wine bar, Melville diplomatically offered that he would not choose to dine in a basement. "Rotterdam is all about space and views," he said, gesturing broadly to the skylight and the lush green space beyond. Rotterdam comes as a relief after the narrow streets and steep stairways of Amsterdam, where washrooms are shoehorned into broom closets and restaurants squeezed into reconfigured boats. A place like Blauwe Vis (blue fish), a lounge and eatery located underground in a former pedestrian tunnel, is considered quirky in Rotterdam – not the norm. The city’s magnificent bridges, monumental buildings, big public art on the Beeldenterras (sculpture terrace) and wide bike lanes all resonate hugely, with the countryside and broad river as their large-scale backdrop. With all that room to move, Rotterdam marches to its own funky beat. Although it has a Michelin three-star dining room (Restaurant Parkheuvel), my favourite meal was at Foody’s, where the innovative young kitchen flies without a menu. At the sleek De Loft, I tell the waiter about the trendy Amsterdam restaurant where you eat dinner lying down. He looks skeptical; Rotterdammers will probably never see such a concept, nor do they want to. In the end, my impressions of the architecture were uneven: Norman Foster’s World Port Center impressed me as much as the lame postmodern Millenniumtoren (tower) disappointed. But an unexpected epiphany came inside an inauspicious looking flat-roofed white house, operated as a museum by the nearby architecture institute. A modern marvel, painstakingly restored, the house has open, flexible social spaces and cozy, efficient private rooms with pragmatic luxuries like hot-water-pipe towel warmers and a dumbwaiter. I expect that it had housed a postwar nuclear family, but photographs of their clothing and cars betray that the house dates from 1932. It was commissioned by one A.H. Sonneveld, an executive at Van Nelle – the -industrial building I had admired on the way into town. The irony seems rich: Despite all the hype about new architecture, some of Rotterdam’s real treasures are more than 70 years old. Although it has packaged itself for contemporary times in the skin of fanciful new buildings, Rotterdam is really an old soul of a city, modern long before its time. ROTTERDAM In contrast to compact Amsterdam, Rotterdam’s horizons are wide open. Take a look. WHERE TO STAY Blakes Chic minimalism reigns in details like a sink hewn from a single block of marble. The restaurant is one of the best in Amsterdam. Keizersgracht 384, Amsterdam 31-20-530-20-10 www.blakes-amsterdam.com Hotel New York Rooms in the former Holland America headquarters are spacious and shipshape: Your closet might be a former vault equipped with lockers to stow your kit. Koninginnenhoofd 1, Rotterdam 31-10-439-05-00 www.hotelnewyork.nl Bilderberg Parkhotel Request a room in the new metallic tower grafted on to the 80-year-old hotel. Unbeatable central location near the Museumpark. Westersingel 70, Rotterdam 31-10-436-36-11 www.bilderberg.nl WHERE TO EAT Nomads Following recumbent-dining -experience Supperclub comes this Arabian Nights fantasy. Rozengracht 133-1, Amsterdam 31-20-344-64-01 www.restaurantnomads.nl Foody's This is the future of dining out: no menu – just name your dislikes, and the chef creates any number of innovative courses, matched with genius wine pairings. Fabulous and fun. Nieuwe Binnenweg 151, Rotterdam 31-10-436-51-63 Bazar Located in the small, exotic hotel of the same name. Choose the Bizar Bazar platter of grilled and spiced meats followed by honey-drenched pastries, Turkish delight and sweet mint tea. Witte de Withstraat 16, Rotterdam 31-10-206-51-51 WHAT TO DO Van Gogh In 2003, Holland celebrates the 150th birthday of Vincent Van Gogh with many events, including exhibitions at his namesake museum: Vincent’s Choice (through June 15) and Gogh Modern (June 27 to October 12). Paulus Potterstraat 7, Amsterdam 31-20-570-52-00 www.vangoghmuseum.nl Design Dock Rotterdam A design junkie’s paradise, this former meat-processing plant now stocks vintage and contemporary furniture. Van Helmonstraat 17-23, Rotterdam 31-10-0477-02-00 www.designdockrotterdam.com Archicenter Cross the urban moat surrounding the Nederlands Architectuur Instituut to find architectural information and self-guided tour brochures. Museumpark 25, Rotterdam 31-10-436-99-09 www.nai.nl INFORMATION Netherlands Board of Tourism 1-888-Go-Holland Rotterdam Tourist Information Office 31-10-414-00-00 www.vvv.rotterdam.nl HOW TO GET THERE Air Canada offers non-stop service to Amsterdam from Toronto four times a week starting in May, with daily service as of June.
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