Markthal in Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ first indoor market, opened earlier this month. Spanning 10,000 square metres of stalls and shops and restaurants, up to seven million people will shop and dine there each year.
There’s another boast. It contains the largest artwork in the Netherlands. This horse shoe-shaped building has 11,000 square metres of art wrapped around its ceiling. That’s about the size of two football pitches.
“Horn of Plenty” by Arno Coenen, Iris Roskam and a team of designers and animators has already been nicknamed the “Sistine Chapel of Rotterdam” and the “biggest artwork in the world”.
Coenen enlisted the help of Pixar Studios to create an image large enough, and sharp enough, to fill 4,000 tiled pieces.
Individually placed screens project images of the produce – the fish, fowl and flesh, vegetables, bread and flowers – linking to what’s on sale on the market floor below.
“You could just look at the wonderful, almost psychedelic picture for its beauty, but the reference to the ‘horn of plenty’ points out the miracle that food is there for you,” Coenen told designboom.
“It is a work with a spiritual, religious feel to it. However, its larger-than-life size is not a tale of religion; it’s about nature. in the scientific way, more an ode to Stephen Hawking’s atheist way of looking at the origin of life.”
Who’s behind it?
Rotterdam architectural firm MVRDV with property developer ProVast. The architect is Winy Maas.
How to get there:
The train, metro, tram and bus all stop at Blaak station, which is less than 100 metres from the Markthal. There are direct rail links with Central Station, Amsterdam, The Hague and Leiden. And, of course, there are flights from London to Rotterdam.
Want to see a panorama?
Have a look at this.
