The single frame
Cubes, Pencil, White House and Markthal together.
W. Bulach โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท GraphyArchy โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท GraphyArchy โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท GraphyArchy โ CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes, one of them is open as a small museum called the Kijk-Kubus on a cheap ticket: a fully furnished house you walk through to see how people live inside a cube tilted forty-five degrees โ the walls lean, the windows look at the ground or the sky, and the furniture is purpose-made. The rest are private homes, and one is a youth hostel. The visit is short but answers the question everyone passing has.
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The Blaaktoren is a residential tower standing between the Cube Houses and the Markthal, and Rotterdammers call it the Pencil โ the reason is obvious from a hundred metres away: a cylindrical shaft and a sharply conical upper sixth ending in a point, so that it reads as a sharpened pencil driven into the ground. The architect Piet Blom designed it in the 1980s together with the Cube Houses as a single group, and the idea was a village inside the city: the cubes are the treehouses, and the tower is the village church or its central tower. The shape is not a joke but part of a complete architectural metaphor. The tower is entirely residential and cannot be entered, but its importance for a visitor is visual: it stands at the best point from which Rotterdam's contradictory architecture gathers into one frame โ the yellow cubes, the Pencil, the White House of 1898, the arched Markthal and the bridges beyond. The best-known camera angle is from the footbridge in front of Blaak station.
Cubes, Pencil, White House and Markthal together.
A village tower among the treehouses.
Blaak, 3011 Rotterdam