I wasn’t born in Rotterdam, and I probably won’t spend the rest of my days here. But I do love this place, just for what it is: a true city and one that more or less lacks pretentions. It’s both ugly and beautiful, vibrant and dead, thought-provoking and mind-numbing: a biotope filled with contradictions and problems. It might scare some people, but I think it’s this equivocal nature that makes a city – and indeed life in it – interesting.

This commercial center was conceived during the ‘hongerwinter’ (Dutch famine of 1944) by wholesaler Frits Pot and built after the war by architects Hugh Aart Maaskant en W.J. van Tijen. It was completed in 1953.