MonteVideo - Mecanoo - Rotterdam

3CPO · September 7, 2006

Montevideo - Mecanoo (Delft) - Rotterdam
Março 1999 - Concluído em 2005

World port city
The expansion of its activities has meant that Rotterdam’s harbour has shifted closer to the sea, thus freeing up the old city harbours for other uses. The Wilhelmina Pier lies in such an old city harbour, between the River Maas and the Rhine Harbour, and is being developed into a spectacular residential and office area with a lot of high-rise buildings. The ocean steamers and cruise ships of the Holland-Amerika Line once moored on the Wilhelmina Pier to make the crossing from Rotterdam to New York. The Holland-Amerika Line offices were in what is now Hotel New York. On the Wilhelmina Pier were warehouses with exotic names of international port cities, such as New York, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore and Havana. For the highest residential building of the Netherlands, at the head of the Wilhelmina Pier, a name has been chosen following/that fits into this tradition: name Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.

Holland-Amerika
Montevideo consists of a composition of intersecting volumes, part of which is suspended above the quay. The building refers to the interbellum high-rise buildings of New York, Chicago and Boston: brick built, with refined detailing and use of colour, a lot of roof terraces and loggias. The construction contributes to the Holland-Amerika feeling: a system that alternates steel (Amerika), concrete (Holland) and then steel again. The first two floors are built of steel and bear the 152 metres high tower and the Water Apartments jutting 16 metres out. The 27 floors above are executed with a concrete climbing form. From the 28th floor steel is used, so that the floors of these apartments are freely subdivisible. This allows the building to achieve a very varied spatial structure: 192 dwellings with no less than 54 different types and different floor heights divided amongst Loft, City, Sky and Water apartments. All this on top of a two-storey underground parking facility.

Ocean steamer
The building reminds you of the cross-section of an ocean steamer with different floor heights, different price classes and communal facilities. There are apartments in many sizes and price classes, restaurants, offices, guest suites and a swimming pool with fitness centre and sauna. The residents can use service facilities, such as a shopping service, catering, cleaning and maintenance services, a post-keeping service and a laundry service. The entrance to Montevideo has something of the ambiance of a hotel lobby: its walls are decorated with a map of the Uruguay coastline with evocative names such as Punta del Este, Treinta-y-Tres and Dolores. Apartments facing the sea have a large, circular window in the bedroom, so you can see passing ships through a porthole.

M
At 9.49 a.m. on the 21st of March 2005, exactly two years after building commenced, a crane hoists a gigantic letter M onto Montevideo and the building reaches its highest point of 152,317 metres. The M - an open steel construction measuring 8 x 8 x 1,60 metres and weighing 9 tons - is mounted with a rotating axis onto the jib of the sky gondola. The pine tree set up for the topping out ceremony for the 300 construction workers sticks out merrily above it. The M, Montevideo’s logo, proudly protrudes above the Rotterdam skyline like a weather vane. The M confirms Rotterdam’s maritime tradition and shows all Rotterdammers the wind direction. Together with the water tank by the artist Ineke Hauer on the lower-lying roof, the M makes the Holland-Amerika feeling complete.

Program Tower of 152,317 m with total floor area of 57,530 m² of which 36,867 m² apartments, 905 m² pool, fitness and service space, 6,129 m² offices, 1,608 m² retail and a parking garage of 8,413 m²

Building physics advisor Adviesbureau Peutz & Associes b.v, Zoetermeer
Contractor Besix, Brussels
Building costs incl. installations € 65,000,000 (2005)