MikePadgett.com

Rotterdam

— Second city of the Dutch, Rotterdam makes much of its brutalist architecture and its famous art museum.”

The self-image of the city is that of a no-nonsense workers’ city …. There is a saying: “Amsterdam to party, Den Haag (The Hague) to live, Rotterdam to work”.

So says the Wikipedia article on Rotterdam. Many of these workers drive to Rotterdam’s port, widened during the last century to maintain its position as the biggest in Europe.

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Rotterdam

Europe's largest port, the home of Erasmus and the Netherlands' second city.

Upriver in the city itself, there is something workmanlike about the place, marked as it is by a modern, urban architecture precipitated by the deleterious bombing campaign of 1940.

After the war and in desperate need of rebuilding, Rotterdam became something of a playground for Structuralism, a movement whose primary concerns are the cumulative, often repetitive effect of units (tesselation, patterns) and the utility of shared space.

Key structuralist developments can be found in the Oude Haven wijk, in which there are located several complexes for collective living. Elsewhere in Rotterdam are some of the Netherlands’ only examples of high-rise building. We stayed in one of them: the Westin hotel on Weena.

Rotterdam is also the home of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with its impressive art collection.