Hide and Seek – OMA’s Timmerhuis
Almost as soon as the bombs that all but obliterated Rotterdam had stopped falling, the redevelopment of the city began and it’s been going on ever since. The latest addition is the Timmerhuis - a ‘floating cloud of steel and glass’ by OMA, that seems to hide itself in the fabric of the city
In May 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam so heavily that its historic centre was all but completely destroyed - around 1,000 people died and 85,000 more were left homeless. With threats to do the same again elsewhere, the Germans subsequently took over this dock town and the rest of the Netherlands.
OMA partner Reinier de Graaf, who describes Timmerhuis as 'a floating cloud of steel and glass. Photo: Ekaterina Izmestieva
As a result of the Nazis' occupation, Allied forces bombed the strategically important dock areas and on at least one occasion missed the target and hit residential areas, causing more massive damage and loss of life. Rotterdam was so thoroughly decimated that reconstruction actually began during the war. From the outset it appears to have been seen as an opportunity to start afresh and redesign the city, with any remaining historic buildings that could have been restored, instead being demolished.
Unsurprisingly, not a huge amount was finished during the war, and when peace finally came, fresh plans were put in place that saw a new kind of urban development -- one familiar to those who know post-war urban renewal attitudes. The city centre was given over to offices, shops and roads. The latter connected it to the suburban areas where the people were to live.
The building plays hide and seek, with views of it only opening up as you get near. Photo: Ossip Van Duivenbode
At the very heart of this post-war reconstruction planning was the Stadstimmerhuis building, built in 1950. This is where all the planning and overseeing was done from and it is this building, radically extended laterally and vertically, that is the latest offering from Rotterdam-based, global architecture practice OMA. In many ways Timmerhuis, as it is now known, brings the story of post-war urban planning full circle as it seeks to overthrow the old centre/suburb demarcations once and for all and bring everything back together in one place: government, culture, shopping, dining and living in one building in the heart of the city.
OMA's steel and glass structure hugs the original Fifties' building delineated by the use of brick. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
Most recently in Rotterdam, OMA created the De Rotterdam, a building on a vast scale by the river (also including local government functions), which nonetheless has a lightness of touch and humour in the way it plays with the vast cuboid volumes it employs.
Timmerhuis is on an altogether different scale. For one, unlike De Rotterdam - which can be seen from miles around - this building doesn't really add to the skyline, you only ever get glimpses of it as views along streets. It has, nevertheless, been designed as a large, cohesive, pixelated mass that OMA describes as 'a floating cloud of steel and glass'. Cloud is an apt analogy as it is perhaps only the seagulls screeching overhead that will ever see it in its entirety and get to appreciate the form fully.
'This is a building in a very dense context,' explains OMA partner Reinier de Graaf. 'This is a building that you don't see. You only see it when you get very near to it, but even when you get very near to it, you never see all of it at once. So this is a composition that, in a way, deliberately plays hide and seek with the city. It's always exposing itself as a fragment, in glimpses. Because it is in a very different situation in the city, it needs a very different attitude from De Rotterdam.'
It's a complicated building that clings on to the original L-shaped structure of the Fifties, somewhat like the froth of a spittlebug on a twig. This froth is the pixelation. From above you would - if you could - see that it looks like a low-res, 8-bit, building that in many ways owes a debt not only to a certain recent trend in aesthetics (witness similar outpourings such as fellow Dutch practice MVRDV's Cloud towers in Seoul and Sou Fujimoto's Serpentine Pavilion), but also to the work of the metabolists.
Floor plans of Timmerhuis, starting at the publicly orientated ground level and ending in residential
The post-war metabolism movement, initiated by Japanese architects such as Kenzo Tange and Kisho Kurokawa, emerged during a time of massive growth and change to cities in Japan coping with an economic surge and large increases in population.
The links with post-war Rotterdam are there to be seen, and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas went further with his 2011 project Japan: Metabolism Talks, citing the metabolists' importance and the success of their modularity ideas, something that is a key feature of the pixelated pods that form the residential part of Timmerhuis. Even visually OMA seems to be quoting from this group: where De Rotterdam appears to gently nod in the direction of Kenzo Tange's Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Tower, Timmerhuis turns to squarely address the Nakagin Capsule Tower building by Kurokawa.
The building's pixelated steel structure allows for a flexibility and modularity during construction Photo: OMA
'People did pixels in 2015, but this was designed in 2009. It was a theme we had experimented with a lot,' explains de Graaf. 'We invented this as a language I think in 2000, on a number of Asian projects. What we liked about it was a number of things: flexibility in terms of image -- if you add, subtract or change anything the superficial viewer will not notice change. It's an aesthetic that works on the aesthetics of accidental randomness, for want of a better phrase. The composition can endure changes without feeling that the building massively changed in terms of shape -- the language is not compromised and any building in this day and age changes while you're designing it in terms of its size and programme. Working as an architect in a market economy almost means working with programmes that are unstable.
The conflux of the new and old: on the interior, the white walls are where you enter new building. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
'Another thing is you can build it in a modular fashion, and we knew in this particular case that the contractor would also be the developer of the apartments. It's a particular policy that we have here in Rotterdam, that they delegate the development and selling of the apartments to contractors, therefore the contractor in parts during this development was also our client and partner.
One of the street views that opens up, this one is from the main Coolsingel thoroughfare in Rotterdam. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
'In a traditional architect-contractor relationship, it's trench warfare. We try to build a good building, they try to build a cheap building and you have to meet somewhere in the middle - it's a constant battle. Here that relationship was different because they had an interest in the quality too, so it was much more of a partnership than an oppositional relationship. Because we knew we'd work so closely with the contractor we decided to design it in a modular way that could be built fast. The buildability of the system was a conceptual ingredient in the process.'
The conflux of the new and old: on the interior, the white walls are where you enter new building. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
In all, 84 apartments, all with 'ample patios', make up the bulk of the frothy pixelated cloud from floors six to the top at 14. But they are by no means the whole story. The new building clings on to the old and integrates with it from the fourth floor down to the ground. Two large atriums deviate from the normal void and are instead are filled with criss-crossing, structural, white steel. This takes the load of the building and allows the cloud to float and not touch the ground. It also allows for column free-spaces at ground level where you are in predominantly double- and triple-height spaces with the cloud, in effect, hovering above you. This means that where the new building does come to earth it does so with a dramatically light and elegant touch.
A meeting area in the new building. OMA has also designed the interiors. This space uses bamboo flooring. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
'I saw the film All the President's Men, about the Watergate affair, and in that you have these news rooms with endlessly deep American office floors and all these open-plan offices that go on into the distance - I always liked that,' enthuses de Graaf, adding, 'and so in that sense, I love buildings without atriums, but you can't build them simply because our regulations require you to give everyone a certain exposure to daylight. So there were always going to be two atriums, but what we did was not interrupt the structure in them; we continued the structure of the building into the atriums, because it helped with overall performance with the structure.
The Museum Rotterdam was never part of the original plan, but OMA's de Graaf believes it is the best substitute it could have hoped for. Photo: Sebastian Van Damme
'So by keeping steel in the atriums it meant that we saved a lot of steel elsewhere in the building. I also like the spectacle because the atrium is one place where you can celebrate the structure and see the structural principles. I remember in 2014, when the building had no walls just the steel structure, it was so beautiful, I almost dreaded that the whole thing had to be finished. The atriums in the interior are a nice fragment of that spectacle so it's one of the things I like a lot.'
In the lower levels of the building are the city government offices and the ground level was meant to be a place where all the city's residents could access the city's services while seeing the municipality at work above it in the offices. Unfortunately this didn't come to fruition and you get a palpable sense of frustration from de Graaf: 'The original concept was pretty much what's been built I have to say, although of course things did change as they do with any building you do. Part of it was meant to be a big public reception space on the ground floor which they called the City Shop, which was meant to house a lot of counters where people could renew their passports, get licences and the like.
An example of the lightness of touch that the building has when it reaches the ground. Seen from inside the museum
'We heard about halfway through that this wasn't going to happen and of course it was a shock. This was the whole reason to have the building floating, the whole architecture was based on accommodating that very important function. We looked together with the client for another tenant which could follow through on the same public ambitions as the City Shop and we found Museum Rotterdam. As you can imagine there was a bit of turbulence in the process -- and in that sense we were very lucky to find the museum. It is the best function we could have found for the city. But, when the City Shop went it was clearly a key moment in whole thing.'
The Museum Rotterdam was never part of the original plan, but OMA's de Graaf believes it is the best substitute it could have hoped for. Image: Ossip van Duivenbode
This missing City Shop is a loss to the building programme. But the museum, being about the city and offering better access to the space in terms of opening hours, doesn't seem like second best, even if it means the integration of the old and new buildings is now even more disjointed. The relationship between them is an odd one, feeling more parasitic than symbiotic. The old building seems to now be subservient to the new. All of the plant has been put inside it, the interiors are muted with grey floors, but explode into life in the new. Even the exterior ornament on the two inward-looking faces of the old building are now enclosed inside and serve the new building.
'It's a very opportunistic relationship,' says de Graaf. 'The old building has monument status largely because of the role it played in the history of Rotterdam. We used it where we could. Its exterior facade became an interior facade, so you see old brick in the interior space, which I think is nice because our building is very industrial. There's very little ornament in the whole thing, and then you get this ornament for free. It is a quote from history.
OMA's Timmerhuis, with MVRDV's Markthal behind it to the left. Image: Ossip van Duivenbode
'Then the other thing we did is we converted half the attic to boardrooms so that we celebrated the old building, and the other half we turned into a plant room so we could ban all plant from the new building, which means that it almost looks ridiculously empty. So the monument simply works for the new building, which I think is a very healthy relationship. We've done this before in our projects. Letting the old work for the new is also an interesting form of preservation, because then you give it a real function in the present rather than just artificially celebrating it as a historical piece.'
The original Stadstimmerhuis was very much a building of its time - as is the Timmerhuis, reflecting changes in urban planning attitudes and lifestyles. Despite its quality and the grand gestures of the cloud, this is a fairly modest statement from OMA - a building that like its physical reality will probably only be glimpsed in future discussions of the practice's output.
