The Markthal ( English: Market Hall) is a residential and office building with a

market hall A market hall is a covered space or a building where food and other articles are sold from stalls by independent vendors. A market hall is a type of indoor market and can be found in many European countries. The most common variation of a mar ...

underneath, located in

Rotterdam Rotterdam ( , ; ; ) is the second-largest List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city in the Netherlands after the national capital of Amsterdam. It is in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, part of the North S ...

. The building was opened on October 1, 2014, by Queen Máxima of the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. Besides the large market hall, the complex houses 228

apartments An apartment (American English, Canadian English), flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), tenement (Scots English), or unit (Australian English) is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that ...

, 4,600 m²

retail space Retail is the sale of goods and Service (economics), services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is the sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturing, manufacturers ...

, 1,600 m²

horeca The hospitality industry is a broad category of fields within the service industry that includes lodging, food and beverage services, event planning, theme parks, travel agency, tourism, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and bars. Sectors Accord ...

and an underground 4-story

parking garage A multistorey car park (Commonwealth English) or parking garage (American English), also called a multistorey, parking building, parking structure, parkade (Canadian), parking ramp, parking deck, or indoor parking, is a building designed fo ...

with a capacity of over 1200 cars.

Architecture

The Markthal was designed by architectural firm

MVRDV MVRDV is a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993, with additional offices in Berlin, New York, Paris, and Shanghai. It is currently regarded as one of the world's finest architecture firms. MVRDV is ...

. The grey nature stone building has an archwise structure like a

horseshoe A horseshoe is a product designed to protect a horse hoof from wear. Shoes are attached on the palmar surface (ground side) of the hooves, usually nailed through the insensitive hoof wall that is anatomically akin to the human toenail, altho ...

. The building has a glass facade on both sides; these are made up of smaller glass windows. The smaller windows are mostly squared and around 1485

millimeters 330px, Different lengths as in respect of the electromagnetic spectrum, measured by the metre and its derived scales. The microwave is between 1 metre to 1 millimetre. The millimetre (American and British English spelling differences#-re, -er, i ...

wide. All of these are hung around a structure of steel cables, 34 metres high and 42 metres wide, which makes it the largest glass-window cable structure in

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

. Each facade has 26 vertical and 22 horizontal cables. The facade was designed and installed by Octatube

Artwork

The inside of the building is adorned with an 11.000 m² artwork by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam, named ''Hoorn des Overvloeds'' (''Horn of Plenty''). The artwork shows strongly enlarged fruits, vegetables, seeds, fish, flowers and insects. The artwork was selected out of 9 international candidates. The work was made using digital 3D-techniques. This enormous file of 1,47

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

s needed special servers, which are also used by Pixar Studios for making animated movies. The digital 3D-animation was separated in 4000 pieces and then printed on perforated aluminum panels. The 4000 aluminum panels are now on the inside of the hall. Right after the opening in 2014, the artwork got a lot of attention from around the world. Some called it ''The largest artwork in the world'' or ''The

Sistine Chapel The Sistine Chapel ( ; ; ) is a chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the pope's official residence in Vatican City. Originally known as the ''Cappella Magna'' ('Great Chapel'), it takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV, who had it built between 1473 and ...

''. Markthal Rotterdam bij avond.jpg Markthal - City of Rotterdam.jpg RotterdamMarkthal6.JPG RotterdamMarkthal2.JPG

Miscellany

* The 4-story

of the Markthal is the largest in the center of Rotterdam. * The Markthal was one of the first buildings in the world that could be seen by

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

. By using the application UAR, made by the NAi, users could see 3D-models of the building, and how it was going to look. * A possible nickname of the Markthal is ''Koopboog''. This name is a reference to the horseshoe shape of the hall and also refers to the nearby Koopgoot.

Archaeological site

The Markthal is built on top of a fourteenth-century buried village in the Polder of Westnieuwland. This

polder A polder () is a low-lying tract of land that forms an artificial hydrology, hydrological entity, enclosed by embankments known as levee, dikes. The three types of polder are: # Land reclamation, Land reclaimed from a body of water, such as a ...

was surrounded by water and dykes to protect the polder during high-tide. There were a few houses and farms in this polder, also at the site of the Markthal. During the building of the Markthal, a tenth-century farm was found 7 metres under the ground. Within the house were two stoves and a few fireplaces. The farm was part of a village before Rotterdam, named Rotta, after the river Rotte. The inhabitants of Rotta were farmers, craftsmen and traders. Earlier, a small settlement from the fourteenth-century was found on the site. Several foundations on the site are now exhibited next to the central staircases underneath the Markthal.De Tijdtrap (The time staircase) exhibition in Markthal http://www.detijdtrap.nl/en/

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.markthal.nl/en/ 2014 establishments in the Netherlands Buildings and structures in Rotterdam Market halls Food retailers Mixed-use developments in the Netherlands Retail markets in the Netherlands 21st-century architecture in the Netherlands