For all its history, and the extent of its wartime bombing and reconstruction, Rotterdam remains a city in transition – and nowhere more so than at the Central Rail Station.

The original 50’s station has been pulled down and the site is now a building site, the temporary station no more than bright blue prefabs reminiscent of early Grimshaw or Cedric Price. Around it huge faceless mirrored towers suggest that the city has succumbed to the worst excesses of corporate architecture; but 15 minutes walk away, at the South end of Museumpark is one building that still shows that the city can be the patron of some of the most powerful contemporary architecture around. OMA’s Kunsthal is filled with ideas that feel as fresh now as they did when it first opened in 1992. 

Challenging the notion that the art gallery is a closed receptacle of high art and culture, the Kunsthal opens out to the city on all four sides, walkways and a road forming a cross in plan and literally drawing and quartering the building. Traditional notions of circulation are turned on their head, with the auditorium leading you to the galleries giving this usually private space a massive public symbolism and significance. The section of the building has floors crashing through one another creating surprise and incidence. Externally, plays are made with the Miesian aesthetic, as if the Barcelona Pavilion with its materiality met the New State Gallery Berlin in a head-on crash. A single I beam, painted orange sits on the roof like a huge shard of metal thrown free of the wreckage. 

Nothing is quite what it seems in the Kunsthal. The route around the building constantly surprises, bringing you back to a place you’ve been in before or unfolding a new space before you in equal measure, at every turn. Travertine and black glass meets corrugated plastic and galvanised metal grilles, a collusion of the sacred and the profane, while details are raw and robust- some junctions look like they defy the very notion of watertight. 

Walking through the building remains a thrilling experience. In a sense there is almost too much architecture. You feel like it should be suffering from ‘first building’ syndrome, with too many ideas packed in, but the moves are so subtle and complex as to defy this simple classification. There is so much that challenges in the Kunsthal that you sense it is a building that you will have to return to and re-experience. In realising the design, Rem Koolhaas redefined a building typology and by the very fact that it still resonates now shows that in the sometimes transient and fickle world of art, and against maybe Koolhaas’s own opinions on the contemporary condition, great ideas endure.