The structure is 150 m high (44 floors) and more than 100 m wide are eight blocks stacked on top of each other in two rows. This is another "commentary" by Rem Koolhaas on the archetype of the international-style prism-skyscraper, which is also reminiscent of the aluminum profiles that line the facades with a dense mesh. On an area of 162 thousand m2, offices, housing and a hotel are located, united by a base with a 7-storey atrium, conference rooms and restaurants, as well as a parking lot hidden behind glass walls.
The architects emphasize the "efficiency" of the building, practically shaped by the "forces of the market": the building density here reaches its maximum. But you can also see in De Rotterdam a reproduction on the banks of the Meuse of that “culture of overpopulation” that Koolhaas wrote about in Delirious New York: this is an entire Manhattan, compressed into one building. It is not for nothing that the authors of the project define its type as a “vertical city”.
The second subject of interest of architects is the perception of the building from afar, in particular - when crossing the Meuse by car along
the Erasmus bridge, when every second the corners and volumes of a giant building are added to a new composition. In an interview with The Guardian, Koolhaas calls this optical game central to the project, and the rest is "just a cheap office building."
The construction with a budget of 340 million euros includes 72 thousand m2 of offices, 240 apartments and a hotel with 278 rooms. Most of the space has been allocated for offices, but it is not yet clear how much it will be possible to fill them: in Rotterdam, about 30% of office buildings are empty, and De Rotterdam was only able to open thanks to the relocation of the city administration, which rented a significant part of the premises. Due to the magnificent view of the city, the apartments are among the most expensive in the city, although this panorama is somewhat spoiled by the frequent lattice of profiles on the facades.
The transformation of the port areas on the Meuse into the new business center of Rotterdam began back in the 1990s. In 1997, OMA took up the De Rotterdam project, although it was possible to start construction only after the financial crisis - in 2009, when contractors' services became much cheaper due to falling demand.
