How Rotterdam became a global capital of architecture, in photos

Over the past decades, Rotterdam has managed to earn a privileged position within the European architectural landscape.Built on the ruins of its historic centre, destroyed by German bombing during the Second World War, the port city has evolved into an open-air urban laboratory with a strong experimental and avant-garde vocation. A composite of styles and visions, Rotterdam has become both a manifesto and an international reference point for modern and contemporary architecture. This ongoing process of urban transformation is the focus of "Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 – Now", one of the two inaugural exhibitions of the new Nederlands Fotomuseum, housed in the former Santos Warehouse coffee warehouse.

Curated by Frits Gierstberg and Joop de Jong, the exhibition traces a long visual trajectory spanning 180 years of urban and photographic developments, creating a two-way associative dialogue between the evolution of photographic language and architectural form. "Rotterdam in Focus" brings together more than 300 photographs documenting the city’s transformations from 1843 to the present, offering a thematic reading based on visual affinities that connects different periods and modes of representing the layered urban fabric that still defines Rotterdam today.

The exhibition path highlights the evolution of the photographic gaze on architecture, the project’s silent yet central protagonist. In the post-war period, photographs by Cas Oorthuys, Henk Jonker and Aart Klein document the reconstruction through images of open spaces, new urban axes and modern buildings, conveying an idea of a functional and rational city aligned with the urban planning principles of the time. From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, the photographic focus shifts towards a more everyday perspective, attentive to socio-economic dynamics — as seen in the photobooks by Carel Blazer and Onno Meeter — opening up to the genre of the “urban landscape” and to a reading of Rotterdam as a complex territory marked by voids, discontinuities and unfinished transformations.

Finally, works by Iwan Baan, Stacii Samidin and Lou Muuse reflect the “iconic” turn of Rotterdam’s contemporary skyline, relating architectural form, social function and public space, and reinforcing the idea of the city as a laboratory in which every building is a statement and every neighbourhood an experiment. This condition is physically embodied by the new Nederlands Fotomuseum itself, housed in the Santos Warehouse: an architecture that has changed function without losing its memory.

Exhibition: Rotterdam in Focus: The City in Photographs 1843 - Now Curated by: Frits Gierstberg and Joop de Jong Where: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, Netherlands Dates: February 7, 2026 - May 24, 2026