The Kunsthal Opens, 1992

On a seasonably foggy November 1, 1992, Rotterdam’s new temporary art exhibition hall, the Kunsthal, officially opened its doors to the public. Architectural journals were quickly ablaze with images of colorful chairs on the dynamic incline of its auditorium, views of its diagonal columns perpendicular to that incline, leaning precariously against the horizon line, followed immediately by moody, worm-eye shots of silhouettes captured from below the metal mesh floors they were populating. Though diminutive in size when measured against the later oeuvre of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the Kunsthal was a major commission for the firm at the time. OMA had just completed a series of important competition entries that had not become buildings despite their very public life as proposals: projects for ZKM, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Zeebruge Terminal, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. In the wake of this series, the Kunsthal received lavish attention as an eagerly awaited demonstration building. It was OMA’s second scheme for the Kunsthal, a result of their long-term investment in the Museum Park in Rotterdam, and it seemed to finally materialize OMA’s reinvention of an architectural device with a long architectural history: the winding ramp as a device for both circulation and social condensing.

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