Rotterdam Market Hall

Wednesday 2022/09/28

The Rotterdam Market Hall is a spectacular, eleven-story building in the shape of a horseshoe. The facade construction of wire cables and glass panels on the front and back is designed to expand 75 cm during a storm. The ground floor, measuring 70 x 120 meters, houses the market with food stores and restaurants.

The 175 million expensive building was designed by the architectural firm MVRDV. The company, with three office locations in Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Paris, was founded in Rotterdam in 1993 by Winny Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries and develops modern and groundbreaking projects worldwide in the fields of architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture.

The ceiling of the hall features an artwork by Dutch artist Arno Coenen, which he designed together with his team Coenen (Iris Roskam, Frank aan de Stegge, Michiel van Iperen, Dustin Kershaw, Marinus de Ruiter) in collaboration with Frank Hanswijk and Winny Maas. It is called "Hoorn des Overvloeds" (Cornucopia) and shows a modern interpretation of the still lifes of old Dutch masters. The magnificent work is around 11,000 square meters and consists of 4,000 glass panels - each measuring 1.5 by 1.5 m.

What makes the Market Hall particularly special are the 228 apartments, distributed from the second to the eleventh floor, on the outside of the building. All of them are equipped with an outdoor balcony, and many have one or more windows overlooking the market hall. Although they cannot be opened, residents can look down into the hall from above. The first basement houses a supermarket together with a wine and spirits shop and a drugstore. Below that, spread over three levels, is an underground car park with almost 1200 parking spaces.

It is estimated that between 4.5 and 7 million visitors shop, dine, or just stroll through the market hall each year. Already in the year of the opening on October 24, 2014, the number of one million visitors was reached.

We took the metro from the suburb Nesselande to Rotterdam-Blaak and first looked at the Market Hall, which impressed us greatly. And we bought some fine salami at Monsieur Saucisson and some fine Arabic pastry at Tarboosh Sweets. And of course, we took many photos.