Rotterdam: A city reinventing itself

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Take a hard hat and watch your step. As if the world's biggest port isn't already busy enough, this city is reinventing itself.

From the balconies of the century-old Hotel New York, an icon of the old Rotterdam, the sounds of piledrivers and jackhammers waft in off the Maas River. Fenced-in construction sites spill over streets. This city always had a rough edge -- now it's in your face from morning till night.

At the same time, it is confounding the Dutch proverbial sense of flatness. While most of the country is barely above sea level, with only the occasional church spire breaking the wide horizons, Rotterdam is looking up from every angle, with skyscrapers piercing the skyline here, there and everywhere.

It is a project that has steadily accelerated since the World War II bombing in May 1940 flattened the heart of Rotterdam. Over the past decade, however, Rotterdam has been building boom city.

And as much of the Netherlands has long buckled under the constraints of building restriction, it seems someone threw the urbanism rule book into the Maas two decades ago.

Since then, Rotterdam has been an architect's paradise. Steel beams, glass facades and apartment blocks have been implanted into the sandy surface at just about every possible angle.

One new skyscraper was even built tilted, on purpose.

Rotterdam, with a population of 575,000, is starting to attract a crowd of urban design lovers to get a front-row seat in hatching a new city, drawing visitors away from rival Amsterdam's tranquil canals, soothing bourgeois architecture and array of "coffee shops."

Rotterdam has a slew of new restaurants, new hotels are under construction, and even its famed Boymans van Beuningen museum is -- what else -- under renovation.

The city was chosen by the European Union as a 2001 European Culture Capital, a designation it shares with Porto, Portugal.

During the year-long celebration, various cultural events will highlight Rotterdam's seafaring tradition, its architecture, and Holland's Golden Age.

In an exhibition titled "In the Shadow of the Golden Age," Dutch masters will be juxtaposed with such painters as Picasso, Matisse and Manet.

The port will be highlighted in "Rotterdam and the Rhine," featuring vessels from the 17th to 21st century.

By the time 2001 rolls around, Rotterdam should have finished several building and renovation projects. Others, though, will just be starting.

What has already been completed in this vast open-air museum of modernism is spectacular.

The city's new symbol is the Erasmus Bridge. Opened in 1996, it spans the 800 metres (2,640 feet) between both banks of the Maas, opening a whole new section of the city for development. The 138 metre (460 foot) pillar, from which the suspension cables hold up the road, tram and cycling lanes, is so handsome it earned the nickname "the Swan."

The best view for landlubbers is from the top of the Noordereiland islet in the middle of the Maas. The more adventurous can get a water taxi into the Leuvehaven in the centre of town. Fishtailing in between the tugs and barges, the view is breathtaking and perhaps even better when returning from a night on the town.

At the end of the bridge and onto the Wilhelminapier is the city's architectural lab at its most experimental.

Nothing quite prepares you for the KPN Telecom head office, a 330 foot high building which tilts as much as the Tower of Pisa. The huge glass wall has to be supported by a huge steel pillar stuck deep in the building's abdomen to prevent it from crashing onto the streets.

Once fully constructed, the building by Italian architect Renzo Piano will be topped by a giant television screen hulking over the city.

Much of the rest of the pier has been turned into the playground of Sir Norman Foster. The British architect's World Port Centre has already reached its full height of 145 metres (480 feet) and its rounded translucent structure will provide some of the best views of the harbour.

Close to the central train station, the Millennium tower may be late in completion, but at 149 metres (490 feet) in a 21st century throwback to Art Deco, it already impresses.

The list of construction sites and just-completed high-rises could go on, but one architectural gem no one should miss is Piet Blom's 1984 cube houses, a spectacular array of what looks like giant Lego pieces stacked together on their vertex.

Blom's blocks clash with the old Rotterdam on the Oude Haven. Facing it is the 1898 Witte Huis (White House), at a mere 45 metres (150 feet), Europe's first skyscraper and currently host to the Mariners' Museum.

It was one of the few structures to survive the German Luftwaffe's carpet bombing of Rotterdam at the outset of World War II. Archive pictures showing the charred flatness of the rubble with only the White House sticking out are still shocking.

At the heart of the city now stands Ossip Zadkine's Verwoeste Stad (destroyed city), the expressionist statue of a panicked man, looking upward and stretching out his arms skyward in sheer terror. His ribcage has been gutted, showing how Rotterdam's heart was ripped out. Zadkine's statue is for Rotterdam what Picasso's painting was for Guernica -- the horrors of war symbolised.

Even though the wartime destruction was wholesale, some neighbourhoods survived, providing a soothing escape from the raw urban hymns pounding all over the port.

Stroll along the Willemskade and Veerhaven hugging the Maas and it is a picture of a bygone era with elegant trader's mansions and moored sailing boats. To learn more about what the ships were bringing in from the far-flung Dutch possessions and trading posts from Indonesia to Southern Africa, spend some time at the Wereldmuseum (museum of the world) among the masks, statues and weapons from tribes across the globe.

But as this is Rotterdam hotly anticipating its stint as Culture Capital, it is currently under renovation.

Colonial relics and references to the power and might of the famed Dutch East India Trading Company abound in the port city, with old shipping warehouses called Borneo, Celebes or Java.

And, Japanese architect Fumi Hoshino will start renovating some of the warehouses later this year, literally splitting some them open to allow light to reach the bowels of the buildings.

The huge Entrepot warehouse, a red-brick structure adorned with the names of the continents on its side, has already undergone renovation and is now a pleasant collection of shops, restaurants and terraces on one of the city's many docks.

Some of the oldest docks are on the Delfshaven, another haven away from the city's roaring modernism.

Lined with quaint houses, it also has the Pilgrim Fathers' Church close to the place where, on July 22, 1620, the first Puritans started their odyssey to the New World via Plymouth, England.

Now, the Delfshaven has been dwarfed by the giant port that Rotterdam has become.

The open-air Maritime Museum has a staggering array of cranes, anchors and other shipping paraphernalia on show, but the true maritime star in Rotterdam is the port as it is now.

It spans some 40 kilometres (25 miles) and handles some 310 million tons of goods a year. Some 30,000 ships and 140,000 river barges use it every year. About 9 million tons of crude oil is stored in gleaming tanks.

But better than mere statistics, a tour of the river Maas shows tourists why Rotterdam is so busy -- always.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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