De Maasbode is a unique, 70-metre-tall residential tower in the centre of Rotterdam. It is the first residential tower to offer a social living environment for families in the city centre through the stacking of residential streets featuring three-storey family homes: a Family Scraper.
Situated at the border between the dynamic high-rise zone and a mixed-use 19th-century residential neighbourhood, the building forms a striking, urban residential sculpture situated next to a green playground with schools and amenities. The lively plinth and monumental entrance street provide space for socialising and open invitingly to the surrounding area.
De Maasbode celebrates Rotterdam’s post-war reconstructive architecture, characteristic of the city centre, through its richly articulated façade and the warm material palette. The façades, composed of weathered yellow brick, anthracite-pigmented concrete, and warm travertine, create a strong visual connection with the surrounding urban context.
‘Rotterdam is keen to offer families with children a place to live in the city. But how can ideal family homes, social cohesion, and a safe play and living environment for children be combined with high-rise buildings? To address this challenge, we developed a residential tower specifically designed for families, together with our client BPD.’
Evert Kolpa, van Bergen Kolpa Architects
The design addresses a specific challenge for Rotterdam: how to provide families with children with a place to live in the city centre while creating social cohesion and a safe environment for children. Van Bergen Kolpa Architects developed the tower with client Bouwfonds Gebiedsontwikkeling around this brief.
Stacked neighbourhoods
Families want to live in the city, close to amenities, while also seeking a social environment for themselves, surrounded by neighbours and familiar faces. De Maasbode is therefore organised into small residential communities, each comprising around ten homes arranged on a genuine internal street. These streets serve as meeting places for neighbours and safe play areas for children.
“Unique are the three-storey family homes, situated along stacked neighbourhood
streets. The city is visible, tangible, and audible. This is how we build communities.
Unprecedented, delightfully unconventional, and unmistakably Rotterdam.”
Paul Becht, Development Manager, BPD Bouwfonds Area Development
The three-storey family homes have their front doors and kitchen-diners opening onto these inner residential streets, creating a peaceful oasis amid the dynamism of the city. A rear collective pathway connects the green private terraces of the homes informally along the facade of the tower. An evening stroll around the tower becomes an urban walking experience unlike any other.
An urban residential sculpture
Situated at the intersection of the dynamic high-rise district and a mixed 19th-century residential neighbourhood, De Maasbode forms a striking urban residential sculpture overlooking a green playground surrounded by schools and local amenities.
The building is composed of three distinct elements: a base, a middle section and a crown. The base accommodates residential studios and apartments close to the vibrant entertainment district.
The middle section of the tower houses the family homes, with generous south-facing green outdoor spaces offering a sheltered retreat above the bustle of the city. On the top floors, in the crown of the building, spacious penthouses offer panoramic views over the city. With its diverse range of housing types, De Maasbode makes a valuable contribution to the city.
‘The extent to which De Maasbode manages to strike a balance between social quality and high-rise architecture is innovative and exemplary.’ Emiel Arends, Urban Planner, Municipality of Rotterdam and author of the book ‘City without the Fear of Heights’
Vibrant plinth
The building creates space for residents to meet each other while opening itself up invitingly to the surrounding neighbourhood. A monumental entrance street runs through the plinth, with a range of communal and commercial functions directly visible along its length.
It provides a central, welcoming entrance where residents encounter one another during their daily routines, on their way to and from the bicycle storage, mailboxes, shops and their homes. With its transparent entrance façades and storefronts, the urban plinth is fully open to the street on all sides.
Warm and rich materiality
With its richly articulated façades and warm material palette, the sculptural building celebrates, in a contemporary manner, the modernist heritage of the post-war reconstructive architecture that characterises the centre of Rotterdam.
The interweaving of horizontal and vertical lines in the façades, composed of weathered yellow brick, anthracite-pigmented concrete and travertine, strengthens the building’s connection with its immediate surroundings.
The brick paving extends the outdoor atmosphere into the entrance streets and internal residential streets. Details such as glass light fittings lend the building an authentic character. The full-height, vertically sliding steel-framed windows can be opened to create generous French balconies, giving each home exceptional living qualities and panoramic views.
‘Through a carefully engineered prefabricated construction system, we succeeded
in realising a complex stacking of internal streets, circulation galleries and a variety
of housing types in an inner-city location.’
Jan Holleman, project leader at Van Wijnen.
A carefully engineered prefabricated construction system was used to realise the complex stacking of internal streets, circulation galleries and different housing types within the inner-city location.
Green living comfort
The building’s terraces are planted with multi-stem trees and native ground-layer planting, ranging from flowering species such as Prunus to evergreen pines and fruit-bearing mulberry trees. The vegetation creates pleasant microclimates, providing shade and cooling through increased air humidity along the residential streets and on the terraces of the family homes.
The shared use of natural resources, including solar energy, heat exchange with the residential streets and the reuse of rainwater for irrigation, contributes to a green and comfortable living environment for families in the city.
Collective living
De Maasbode enters into a dialogue with a series of collective residential buildings in Rotterdam from different periods, each characterised by an innovative approach to housing typology. Examples include the elevated residential streets with family homes in the Justus van Effen complex (1922), the Cube Houses at Blaakse Bos (1982), and the public internal street with housing in the Markthal (2014). All share the ambition of creating a better living environment within the inner city.
With its stacked residential neighborhoods, De Maasbode introduces an entirely new housing typology to the heart of the city. This fosters social cohesion and diversity, while contributing to an attractive and liveable urban environment—providing the conditions for families to continue their residential journey within the same city.
The project builds on Rotterdam’s history of collective housing, including the elevated residential streets of the Justus van Effen complex, the Cube Houses at Blaakse Bos and the internal street of the Markthal. Rather than reproducing these earlier models, De Maasbode applies the idea of shared residential streets vertically, creating several small neighbourhoods within one high-rise building.
