Rotterdam’s new €175m market hall comes complete with apartments looping over it – some peeping out of giant avocado stones. It’s proudly pop, but is it just the Comic Sans of architecture?

A four-storey high raspberry tumbles past a tree-sized floret of broccoli, while gigantic prawns plummet towards a pile of mega-mange tout. In Rotterdam’s new market hall, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d slipped down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where a panorama of supersized fruit and veg rains down across the ceiling. It’s a Sistine chapel of fresh produce.

As if this wasn’t trippy enough, you then notice bedroom windows peeping out from a lemon, and someone doing the washing up inside the stone of an avocado. It turns out the majestic vaulted ceiling of this new temple to food is also inhabited – it’s an apartment block of 230 flats, bent double over the food hall in hallucinogenic wonder.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new Rotterdam Markthal from MVRDV. Photograph: Ossip van Duivenbode/PR

This €175m conjuring trick is the work of MVRDV, leaders of the wave of “Superdutch” architects that emerged in the Netherlands in the 1990s, spawned from Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture. Driven by poppy polemic, their projects are characterised by improbable structural feats, executed with cartoonish glee. These are “look, no hands!” buildings, where slabs appear to float and towers teeter on the brink of toppling; architectural circus acts that are often dressed up in accordingly garish garb.

Their unlikely structures – which now dot the globe from Oslo to Tokyo – are often initiated by equally fantastical questions: What if pig farms were housed in high-rise towers? What if a comic museum was shaped like a cluster of enormous concrete speech bubbles? At their worst, the answers to these daydreams prioritise wit and wow factor over functional reality; at their best, the jaw-drop is so powerful that all else can be forgiven. So does their latest project manage to tread this fine line?

Galumphing into the middle of the city’s sprawling Blaak market square, the great behemoth of the Markthal is certainly hard to miss. It squats like a chubby elephantine creature, lined with windows and balconies along its 120 metre-long flanks, terminating in a gaping portal towards the square like Milan’s galleria, opening up to suck you into its psychedelic tunnel.

An aerial view of the market. Photograph: Ossip Van Duivenbode/PR

But rather than trumpeting the heroic form of a triumphal archway, its proportions seem squashed and deflated, presenting a facade that is almost wilfully clumsy. It’s like a once-elegant arcade that has been deformed by the practical needs of incorporating straight, vertical lift shafts, naturally lit apartments and larger floor areas for shops in the lower levels, causing the silhouette to flare out at the base, as though it’s wearing bell-bottom trousers. Like the podgy ligatures of the Comic Sans typeface, it feels like it’s trying a bit too hard to be fun.

“We’re not trying to be glassy and stylie, like your Foster and Rogers,” says Winy Maas, the energetic principal of MVRDV. “Rotterdam has a big working class population, so the building needs to be pop. We didn’t want that contemporary poshness, or for it to feel like Harrods food court.” The grey cladding, he says, is the same Chinese granite that Rotterdam is paved with, “to extend the street up over the building,” while the outlandish form is designed to join in with the surrounding “mish mash” of novelty shapes that have congregated in this part of the city.

Flattened during the second world war, Rotterdam has served as a fertile architectural playground for the last 50 years, partly egged on by Hans Mentink, the politician in charge of planning in the 1970s, who called for “architecture with some life in it”. Across the market square stands the startling sight of Piet Blom’s 1970s Kubuswoningen, a forest of tilted yellow cubes hoisted aloft on pillars above the busy main road, forming a bizarre treehouse village – the pinnacle of his manifesto for “living as an urban roof”. Next door stands his hexagonal tower block in the shape of a sharpened pencil, while further along is the central library, a stepped ziggurat sprouting a tangle of bright yellow pipes, like a mini Pompidou Centre.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside the Markthal Rotterdam. Photograph: Daria Scagliola & Stijn Brakkee/PR

“It’s all so cute,” coos Maas, looking down from the window of one of the new Markthal apartments, which enjoy a view of this strange architectural menagerie. “We thought this collection had a sentimental beauty that could be monumentalised in our building” – indeed the elfin whimsy of the pencil tower is nicely framed by the market’s archway. “It’s a continuation, in the best Rotterdam tradition.”

The other side of the apartments look down into the food hall below, an arrangement originally intended to allow residents to haul up their shopping in a basket, but environmental regulations mean the windows are sadly now fixed shut. The odd form has also led to some awkward interiors; the 14 metre-deep flats feel a bit gloomy, with angled walls and windows recalling Blom’s cube houses.

The €1.2m upper level penthouses, meanwhile, have open courtyard terraces with vertiginous views down through windows in the floor. “It will be interesting to see how you feel when your child is playing Lego above a 40-metre drop,” beams Maas, a maniacal glint in his eye.

The traders down below couldn’t be happier with their new home, although those running stalls in the heaving market outside have mixed feelings about their new neighbour. The original plan was for the Markthal to be made up of a third traders from the market, a third new stalls, and a third brand-name shops, but only a few existing traders have taken up the offer of going indoors, given the hike in rent. While Blaak accommodates a broad church, from fine fishmongers to bric-a-brac junk, the Markthal is strictly a foodie utopia of artisan bakers and biological butchers, aimed at a more upmarket clientele. As one shopper puts it candidly: “It’s a great place. You can wander around inside and get inspired by the amazing displays, then go outside and buy the same stuff for a quarter of the price.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Queen Máxima of the Netherlands attends the opening of the Rotterdam Market Hall. Photograph: Barcroft Media

The building’s ethos is one of celebrating local, organic produce, with a centre to promote healthy cooking, and there plans for mini urban farms on the market stall rooftops – although that hasn’t prevented the commercial imperative of including a gigantic chain supermarket in the basement below. And, like many of Rotterdam’s recent inner-city developments, despite it being a beacon of downtown urban life, it has a strangely suburban approach to planning: deep within its bowels is the city’s biggest car park, with 1,200 spaces, despite the metro and bus station being right opposite.

Back in the food hall, technicians are busy preparing the nightly son et lumiere show, projected onto the ceiling, described by its artists, Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam, as “the Big Bang of fruit,” in which produce showers down from the sun. It is a suitable climax for this most surreal of spaces which is, after all, the star of the show. It is an urban interior conceived on a heroic Roman scale, which almost forgives the external clumsiness – and another large apartment block will soon rise next door, helping to screen its immense bulk. “I’m secretly hoping that houses will grow up all around it, like a medieval cathedral,” says Maas. “That would be the dream.”

Oliver Wainwright’s trip to Rotterdam was provided by Rotterdam Partners.



