Fen & Marble Reveal First Look at Rotterdam Flagship

The hoarding came down on a Tuesday morning, and the first thing visible from the street was the stair: a single spiral of blackened steel, rising through three floors without touching a wall.

The site had been empty for nine years, long enough for the neighbourhood to form a settled opinion about what should happen to it, and long enough for two previous schemes to be abandoned at planning.

Tomas Weir, a partner at Fen & Marble and the project lead on the Rotterdam space, has been close to it from the start.

The decision

The ground floor is deliberately unprogrammed. No desks, no fixed counter, nothing bolted down except the stair and a twelve-metre bench cast from the same concrete as the slab.

Two of the people who started the project had left by the time it finished, and the handover notes are now part of the studio's standard kit.

The decision to leave the ground floor open cost them roughly a third of their lettable area.

We wanted a building that looks like it is being used, not like it is being photographed.

Weir

In practice

Upstairs the studio put its model shop behind glass rather than in a back room, so the first thing a visiting client sees is unfinished work.

The detail that will matter in ten years is the one nobody photographed: the junction where the new work meets the old, and who is expected to maintain it.

Peers have been generous in public and more pointed in private, mostly about cost.

There is no shortage of people willing to call it inevitable in hindsight. Nobody involved describes it that way.

What comes next

They open to the public in November, with the model shop lit until ten.