Museum 7, 1950

• Virtual Museum Schielandhuis
• Paul van de Laar, real exhibition
• Five March, virtual reconstruction

After the war Rotterdam finds its way again in work, work, work. The harbours have to be reconstructed and at the same time enlarged. Nowadays these harbours stretch towards the see, and even inside the see, making it possible to unload ships, which don’t even enter the harbour.

Container trade became one of the most important activities in the harbour. It is nearly unthinkable the way the grain and the other trades articles were all loaded and unloaded by hand not even 100 years ago. (Recall the first exhibition room, with all its utensils specially designed for coal and grain barrels.)

Constructing and reconstructing is the joy of the engineer, Rotterdam was a paradise for designers, architects, builders, and it still is. New districts are built around Rotterdam. In the South and in the North. People living in the South of Rotterdam are at half an hour travelling from the centre and children growing up in these new districts don’t even have an idea of living in the ‘real” Rotterdam.

Some dreams of architects turned out not to be heaven to live in, like the big collections of huge flats in the North. Some of these flats are torn down, like in the rest of the world. The development of shop to mall, from mall to shopping centre is also shown in the design of the pedestrian shopping zone the Lijnbaan. The first impact of people visiting this new shopping centre was so big that traffic police had to guide the big crowds visiting this new phenomenon.

http://www.hmr.rotterdam.nl/