Markthal Rotterdam

A Square That Never Stopped Teaching

Before the glass facade and the painted ceiling, this exact spot held a school. Two of them, in fact. Generations of Rotterdam children learned to read and count in the post-war school building at the Grotemarkt, home to the Catholic Willibrordschool and the Montessori school Jan Prins. When the Markthal plans took shape, both schools moved in 2009 to a converted building at Nieuwstraat 15, one street behind today's market hall. They are still there. Their playground now sits on the roof, fourteen metres up, with a football cage overlooking the building that replaced their old classrooms.

The lesson simply changed subject. Where children once recited times tables, more than a hundred stalls now teach visitors what a ripe Dutch cheese smells like, and how stroopwafels taste when the syrup is still warm. Look up and the old classroom poster still hangs there, in a way. The Horn of Plenty ceiling, eleven thousand square metres of oversized fruit, grain, fish and flowers, reads like a giant botany chart for the whole city.

The teaching goes deeper than the market floor. Archaeologists dug down ten metres here before construction began and found a farmhouse from the tenth century, part of Rotta, the settlement that gave Rotterdam its name. This corner of Rotterdam's history has been schooling people for a thousand years. First it taught farmers to live with the river. Then it taught children. Now it teaches taste.

Timeline: From Riverbank to Market Hall

Ten centuries do not fit under one roof easily. Here is the short version, from a riverbank settlement to a landmark of modern Rotterdam architecture.

c. 900–1100

The settlement of Rotta stands on the banks of the river Rotte. During the Markthal excavations of 2009–2010, city archaeologists uncovered a tenth-century farmhouse seven metres below street level, complete with two ovens and open hearths.

c. 1270

A dam is built in the Rotte near today's Hoogstraat. The dam gives the city its name, Rotterdam. Its remains still lie beneath the street next to the Markthal.

14th century

The site becomes part of the Westnieuwland polder. A late-medieval house named Keulen stands on the future Markthal footprint.

1871

The Binnenrotte, the stretch of river inside the city, is filled in for an elevated railway viaduct on the Rotterdam–Dordrecht line.

14 May 1940

The German bombardment destroys the Hoogstraat district, before the war Rotterdam's main shopping street.

Post-war years

A school building rises at the Grotemarkt. It houses the Willibrordschool and the Jan Prins Montessori school, with the Willem de Zwijgerschool also recorded here in the city archives.

1993

The railway viaduct comes down after the Willemsspoortunnel opens. The Binnenrotte becomes one of the largest open squares in the Netherlands, hosting an outdoor market of over 450 stalls on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

2004

MVRDV and developer Provast win the city's design competition with a horseshoe of apartments arched over a covered market.

2009

Both schools move to Nieuwstraat 15, where a rooftop playground replaces their old schoolyard. Construction starts in October. Archaeologists dig first.

1 October 2014

Queen Máxima opens the Markthal, the first covered fresh-food market in the Netherlands, built for roughly €178 million.

2015

The building wins the Dutch NEPROM development prize, one of several national and international awards.

Today

Reported visitor counts have hovered around seven to eight million a year since the late 2010s. The schoolchildren still play next door, one roof higher than before.

The Time Stairs: A Free Museum Below the Market

Everything the archaeologists found stayed on site. De Tijdtrap, the Time Stairs, is a permanent, free exhibition built into the escalator hall and the parking levels -2, -3 and -4 of the Markthal. Visitors descend about fifteen metres and a thousand years at once, past display cases with kitchenware, tools, jewellery and weapons dug up right here. The deepest cases belong to Rotta, the farming settlement that predates Rotterdam itself. Few cities let you park your car inside an archaeological dig.

Architecture: A Horseshoe of Homes

MVRDV solved an unusual brief by bending an apartment building over the market like an arch, engineered with Royal HaskoningDHV. The horseshoe holds 228 apartments across eleven floors, four of them below ground, under a roof forty metres up. Both open ends are sealed with a cable-net glass facade of roughly 34 by 42 metres, among the largest of its kind in Europe. Inside, the Horn of Plenty by artist Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam covers the vault, around 11,000 square metres of artwork printed on 4,000 perforated aluminium panels.