Rotterdam today

Stairwell in the former Unilever headquarters (now a high school)

Delftse Poort by A Bonnema, 1991

So, a few days of modern architecture in Rotterdam – modern, not just modernist, so that includes the stuff that left me cold the last time I toured Rotterdam. A walk up to the impressive new station, but this time I was struck by how the Delftse Poort was almost invisible in the sunshine. The lightness and airiness of modern buildings were revealing themselves to me. I’ve since learned how current Dutch architects are trying – like their modernist forebears – to bring the outside inside, even 20 floors up. Rooftop and balcony gardens are critical, and the plans for the bowl-shaped Depot (the new storeroom for the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum) show trees bubbling over the top. (I’m not sure how practical this is; the only high-rise piece of greenery I saw was a rather sickly conifer in a pot on a 10th-floor balcony of the Timmerhuis, but it may be that a critical mass of greenery can create its own healthy micro-environment.)

We also stopped to look at a reconstruction of J J P Oud’s 1925 Café De Unie (the original was destroyed in the 1940 bombardment and subsequent fire):

Next was the Sonneveld House (again), of which I had an excellent view from my hotel bedroom.

Sonneveld House, Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, 1933

This time the house’s history slotted neatly into my expanding knowledge base: the owner was a co-director if the Van Nelle factory who was so taken with Brinkman & Van der Vlugt’s design for that that he commissioned them to build a family home. Furniture-maker Willem Gispen made tubular steel furniture for both buildings.

Chabot Museum, Baas & Stokla, 1939

I liked the recollection of one of the children: she left an over-stuffed bourgeois house in the morning when she went to school and returned to her new modernist home in the afternoon. The Sonneveld House was planned to form a line of modernist villas (resembling the Meisterhäuser in Dessau) but they were never completed.

Grosse Studie, Kandinsky, 1914

This time I also visited the Chabot Museum, which has a small collection of expressionist art by Henk Chabot and others. With the forthcoming closure of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, it has temporarily gained a couple of Kandinskys and a security guard. I was also introduced to the De Branding movement – an interwar avant garde art association.

After lunch we stormed the former Unilever headquarters. (I’d passed it on my post-breakfast stroll and thought it rather grand for a high school.) It has wonderful coloured, textured glass in the stairwell, and the ground and second floors are plain but very grand. There can’t be many high school students who open hardwood doors to visit the loo and descend a staircase that is a work of art. Unilever’s current HQ is also very striking (cantilevered big glass box), but I prefer this one. The three figures on the central tower are just great. Designed by H F Mertens (whom I’d also admired in Den Haag) 1930-31.

Then finally the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum and its exhibition on the ties between the Bauhaus and the Netherlands. It suggested that the Neoplasticists and their magazine, De Stijl, influenced the Bauhaus away from expressionism towards functionalism. My poor brain was fairly overloaded by this time, but I did find it intermittently fascinating to study the links between De Stijl and Dessau . . . and slightly galling to realise how much I’ve seen and forgotten.