By Rory Stott

October 2024 marks 10 years since Queen Máxima of the Netherlands opened the Markthal in front of a crowd of 1,600 people – with many, many more waiting outside for a chance to be one of the first people inside Rotterdam’s newest attraction, a combination of food, leisure, and living. In the decade since its inauguration, the Markthal has become an icon of the city and one of the most recognisable and talked-about buildings in the whole of the Netherlands. It has also been witness to – and played a part in – a dramatic urban transformation in Rotterdam, becoming irrevocably intertwined with the story of the city at large.

Queen Máxima opening the Markthal in October 2024 ©Fred Ernst

In the Markthal, 228 apartments are arranged into a large arch, strategically allowing a private initiative to create a public space. The result is a covered square which features a central market hall during the day and, after closing hours, a lively series of restaurants on its lower levels. It is a hybrid building where people are able to shop, eat, enjoy a drink, and live. Cornucopia, an artwork by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam that at 11,000 square metres is the largest 2D artwork in the world, covers the inside layer of this arch with a shower of colour in the form of fruits, vegetables, food, plants, and insects.

On opening, the building was an immediate phenomenon. The media quickly latched onto various iterations of the moniker “the Sistine Chapel of Rotterdam” or “the Sistine Chapel of food”, and images of the project were published worldwide, with 120 articles in just the first week. To this day, the Markthal continues to feature regularly in magazines, from design journals to travel and lifestyle glossies. In 2021, it was featured in the first season of the Smithsonian Channel’s How did they build that?, focusing on the building’s exceptional design, engineering, and construction process.

In the first year after opening, the Markthal received 9.5 million visitors, a number that – with the exception of the pandemic years – has remained remarkably consistent for a decade, with 8.5 million visitors in the past year, around double the 4 million (mostly local) visitors projected during development. Studies over the years have attested to its positive impact on the city: in 2017, a study by Strabo concluded that the number and profile of visitors to the Markthal was on its own comparable to that of a medium-sized city centre, while determining that the Markthal had brought a positive economic impact to the twice-weekly market on the adjacent Binnenrotte. Interestingly, this study concluded that around half the visitors to the Markthal came from the Rotterdam area, meaning that the building had met its original expectations of 4 million local visitors per year – only with the addition of a further 4 million visitors coming from outside the city.

©Steven Scholten

Such prominence rarely comes without criticism, and the Markthal was no different in this regard. The project has won awards for the engineering of its cable-net glass façades, for its parking garage, and for marketing, among other things, yet high-profile architecture awards have largely eluded it. The jury report for the 2015 BNA Building of the Year – the Netherlands’ most prestigious architecture award – is highly complimentary about the design, but adds the building is “An icon, but that's also where it hurts. The Markthal scores very high on one point, but remains too much of a one-liner for some jury members.”

In a recent interview with Parametric Architecture, MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas summarises how such debates are a reflection of the building’s attempts to innovate: “I appreciate that people talk after our buildings are done, that some people like them and others don’t like them so much – it’s fine, because that is our society. If I pleased everybody in one go, I would start to doubt myself, because then I didn’t go to the edge, to this kind of frontier where we have to fight for the future.”

Irrespective of such debates, the project’s impact has extended far beyond the building itself, as the Markthal has become a key part of the city’s image. The building usually features alongside older icons such as the Euromast and the Erasmus Bridge in stylised depictions of the Rotterdam skyline. When the city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2021, the Markthal was one of a handful of structures included in the “online village” that accompanied the event. This year, the Markthal was added to a new “Rotterdam section” at the Madurodam miniature amusement park in The Hague.

Kim Heinen, Manager of Media Relations & Public Affairs at Rotterdam Partners, has seen first-hand how the Markthal has become part of Rotterdam’s image. “I feel that because the Markthal is such a bold gesture, it is really fitting for Rotterdam”, she says. “Rotterdam is such an atypical, almost un-Dutch city, I think there’s no better place than Rotterdam to have the Markthal.”

This transformation of the city’s image has coincided with a transformation of the city’s character itself. In the past ten years, the number of tourists visiting the city has doubled [1], and publications including Vogue and CNN have hailed Rotterdam as “Europe’s next capital of cool”. Meanwhile, a series of ambitious urban development projects have made parts of the city virtually unrecognisable compared to how they looked in the 20th-century. The Markthal, while being one project within this urban process, has also been a catalyst for accelerating it. “Because of the impact that the Markthal had on Rotterdam, it also enabled other big, bold projects to really take off, and to give the city more confidence in being experimental in terms of architecture”, explains Heinen.

CNN hailing Rotterdam as ''Europe’s next capital of cool''

This, too, has been a contentious process. In a 2024 paper for the journal Cities, Gijs Custers and Jannes J Willems analyse how the political and urban changes in Rotterdam of recent decades have brought undeniable prosperity and improved liveability. Yet these improvements have not always been equally shared, with the paper ultimately asking “a capital of cool for whom?”

The question has its parallels at the Markthal. A persistent topic of debate ever since the market hall opened has been the mixture of vendors. The original goal was to feature a balanced mix of salt-of-the-earth market traders and local culinary businesses, with a clear divide between the character of the market stalls in the hall and gastronomy at the sides of the building. A last-minute strategy change before the opening mixed more culinary stalls into the market hall. As a result, in 2014 some already questioned whether the intended mix had been achieved. For example, in his review for the Guardian, critic Oliver Wainwright claimed that “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.”

While debates raged over the accuracy of such assessments, over time the distance between the original concept and the building’s reality has only become more stark. The building’s huge success as a visitor attraction has led to a greater focus on the more profitable, tourism-oriented gastronomy stalls, with greengrocers and flower stalls pushed out by rising rents to be replaced by food chains and takeaways. Apparently, the market hall now resembles a “station hall” or “airport hall” – these are not the words of a trenchant critic with an axe to grind, but of Winy Maas himself, who in 2020 gave an interview to local news station RTV Rijnmond to urge a return to the original market concept [2].

©Daria Scagliola & Stijn Brakkee

Ten years later, what does the Markthal mean to MVRDV? Rotterdam is MVRDV’s home. For any architect, a project becoming a chapter in the story of their home city is an undeniable dream. At the same time, such a project outgrows the architect, and takes on a life of its own. That requires a nuanced relationship with the building, which now belongs more to the public than to its designer.

The Markthal has not only become a symbol of Rotterdam, but a microcosm of the city as a whole. The wide diversity of cuisines represented in its stalls mirrors the roughly half of Rotterdam residents that come from an immigrant background; the bold, unmissable architecture is an example of the city’s ambitious post-war reconstruction and design innovation; and the sometimes-controversial economics of the market itself are influenced by, and indicative of, the economic transformation of the city as a whole. Like Rotterdam, the Markthal is a complex entity – and in a short 10 years, the Markthal has been catapulted into its status as one of the most Rotterdam-ish of buildings. Behind all the nuance, that’s something to be proud of.

Notes

1. This Rotterdam Partners report lists the number of hotel guests – a common metric for tourism numbers – as 1.496 million in 2023 (page 17), while this article quotes a figure of 740,000 in 2012 (Figures for 2013 were not available).
2. Video also on YouTube.