TrendEngel loves food and especially buying food. What cooler place to do so than the market. While Markthalle 9 in Berlin remains a favorite – there is a new kid on the block – the Markthal Rotterdam.
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?
