Witte de Withstraat 50

Rotterdam, NL

How do you open up a closed art bastion to the city?

Rotterdam

Witte de Withstraat 50

Two art institutes share a monumental building on Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam. However, this former girls’ school was a closed bastion. The question was how to open the building up, making it more inviting for passers-by.

No contact with the street

Located in a vibrant urban centre

Connections with regional, national and international networks

Materialisation and articulation of the window openings

Model of a window opening

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam is now called Kunstinstituut Melly

By opening the façade and enlarging the windows, the building has been transformed into a transparent and inviting museum. The exhibition spaces directly behind the windows are used by the two art centres to profile themselves.

Thanks to the renovation, the civic monument from the end of the 19th century can again function as an exhibition space and home base for the two institutes for many years to come. The building now makes a positive contribution to the liveliness and success of Witte de Withstraat.

Witte de Withstraat 50

Since 1990, two institutes for contemporary art have been located in a monumental building on Rotterdam’s Witte de Withstraat: TENT and Witte de With (renamed Kunstinstituut Melly in 2021). However, the building was a closed bastion. Passers-by had no idea what was going on inside and were not invited to enter. The institutes, in turn, had no way of showing themselves to the city.

Other bottlenecks have also been resolved. Awkward height differences have been removed and the routing has been improved. In the heart of the building, a new cultural meeting place has been created, a shared lobby space with a bar, bookshop, cloakroom and reception area for groups. The two institutes share the new desk at the bright entrance of the building, which better expresses the long-desired collaboration between them.