Down by the river: Rotterdam seen from Bolles + Wilson’s Luxor Theatre

Abstract

Circumnavigating Bolles + Wilson’s Luxor Theatre (1996–2001) in Rotterdam, this article explores the complex relationality between the building and the urban field that surrounds it. Reflecting on the ongoing postwar reconstruction of the area, it opens with the reading of a flattened image distanced in space and time — a WWII-era aerial photograph of the bombed city — before shifting to the present and to observational positions that are about being upon surfaces, both of ground and water, and the differential temporalities they imply. In the circumambulation of the building, the subtlety of its torqueing form comes into focus as something that does not only spatially respond to external and internal velocities and patterns of movement but that also sets up a force-field that implicates and gestures to the longer history of the site — a history articulated and brought to the fore by the various interventions in the surrounding urban landscape developed by Bolles + Wilson.