Koolhaas, Hoshino and a box crossed by a ramp, 1988–1992.

The Kunsthal — the Dutch word means “art hall” — is an exhibition building in Rotterdam, and it has no collection of its own. Dutch Wikipedia says that, for that reason, it is in practical terms an exhibition space rather than a museum, organising changing exhibitions on art and culture instead. The Kunsthal itself says that having no collection leaves it free to keep making new choices about what to present, from contemporary art and Old Masters to fashion, design and photography, and that every exhibition starts with an empty space.

The building was designed in 1988–1989 by Rem Koolhaas with the project architect Fuminori Hoshino of the Rotterdam office OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Kunsthal says. Dutch Wikipedia gives 1991 as the year it was built, and the Kunsthal officially opened on 1 November 1992. Its founding director was Wim van Krimpen, who led it until 2000.

The site is a threshold. The Kunsthal stands on the edge of the Museumpark, next to the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam and near Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, with the Westzeedijk on its other side. OMA describes the building as wedged between a busy highway and the network of museums and green spaces of the park, so that it works as a gateway to them. A ramp runs right through the building and bridges a height difference of six metres between the dyke road and the park. The Kunsthal says the “display window” along this ramp can be seen by passers-by from outside and forms part of the public street during the day. Dutch Wikipedia adds that the ramp is used by people who never go in, and that the same principle carries on inside: the public spaces run into one another along one continuous ramp, which also makes the building accessible to wheelchair users.

From outside the Kunsthal looks simple. The Kunsthal describes it as a large, flat, square box with a narrow, tall tower as a vertical accent. Every façade is different and there is no clearly defined front or back, it says, so the building can seem open and transparent at one moment and introverted and closed at the next, calm and streamlined from one side and fragmented, like a collage of separate elements, from another. OMA puts the programme at 3,300 square metres of exhibition space with an auditorium and a restaurant, with sloping floors and tightly organised ramps linking three large exhibition halls and two smaller galleries; the Kunsthal today speaks of seven exhibition spaces, an auditorium and the Kunsthal Café.

Travertine and corrugated plastic, and a tower with a crate stamp.

The materials carry much of the image. The Kunsthal says Koolhaas combined expensive, traditional building materials such as travertine and parquet with inexpensive, ordinary ones: corrugated plastic, exposed concrete, galvanised steel grilles and rough tree trunks. Each exhibition space has its own atmosphere, lighting, materials and size; natural light is filtered through different layers, and alternating transparent and frosted glass opens surprising views through the building. The museum.nl entry for the building says the architecture drew international attention for its use of materials, the placing of the entrance and its steep ramps.

The mark sits on the roof. The tower that rises from the box carries the Kunsthal’s black-and-white logo, and both the Kunsthal and the museum.nl entry say the tower provides cooling and ventilation for the building. Dutch Wikipedia says the logo is based on the stamp used on transport crates to show which side is the top.

Dutch Wikipedia lists the directors who followed van Krimpen. Wim Pijbes, who had worked at the Kunsthal since 1996, succeeded him and became general director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2008; Emily Ansenk was then director until September 2019; and Marianne Splint has been general director since 14 February 2022.

The programme has always ranged widely. Dutch Wikipedia names retrospectives of M. C. Escher, Isaac Israëls, Leonardo da Vinci and Alberto Giacometti, and photography exhibitions on chip stalls, Japanese train commuters, the football club Feyenoord and Playboy in the Netherlands. Its dated list includes Charlie Chaplin from 1 October 2005 to 15 January 2006, Modern Life, on Edward Hopper and his contemporaries, from 26 September 2009 to 17 January 2010, Edvard Munch from 18 September 2010 to 20 February 2011, and Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style from 12 October 2014 to 8 February 2015. Dutch Wikipedia also says that at least one family exhibition is held every year, and that the culinary festival KunsthalKOOKT has taken place every two years since 2004.

A name that describes the building, and a logo carried on its tower.

Photography festivals, fairs and centres face a design problem that many other cultural institutions do not: the work they show is itself made of images, and any poster, banner or cover has to decide how much room to give them. One approach lets the photograph do the talking, with a single picture filling a poster or a catalogue cover and the institution’s name kept small, set in a plain sans along one edge. The other builds a neutral frame, a fixed grid, a strong colour or a typographic block, that stays the same year after year while the pictures inside it change with each exhibition. Many organisations use both, keeping the frame for the institution and giving the image the space on anything that announces a particular show. Inside the galleries the same choice reaches the walls, where vinyl titles, wall texts and caption labels are usually quiet so that they sit beside a print without competing with it.

Much of the identity is also carried in print. Exhibition catalogues and photobooks are often designed with a different publisher or designer each time, so the house style may shrink to a spine, a logo on the back cover and a consistent credit line. Fairs add another setting: rows of booths in a large hall, where the organiser’s signage, floor plans and lanyards have to stay readable next to dozens of galleries with marks of their own. Festivals that spread across a city work at street level, with flags, maps, numbered venues and arrows that guide visitors along a trail of borrowed rooms, churches, shops and courtyards, and a system that holds together across many venues at once.

OMA’s 2014 renovation and a new entrance in 2026.

OMA came back to the building two decades later. Dezeen reported on 4 February 2014 that the office had completed an extensive renovation of the Kunsthal, twenty-two years after finishing it, to improve its energy performance, rework some of its circulation routes and add new security measures. The project was led by OMA partner Ellen van Loon, who said it showed that the building could be updated to meet contemporary requirements “whilst retaining the original concept of an exhibition machine”. designboom, on 12 February 2014, named the City of Rotterdam as client and Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon as partners in charge, and listed the main changes: high-performance insulation for the glass façades and ceilings, efficient lighting, a second entrance giving independent access to the auditorium and exhibition spaces, and a reception, restaurant and shop brought into the main route through the building.

The Kunsthal says it was closed for eight months in 2013 and reopened on 1 February 2014, with its main entrance moved to the Museumpark side and the former shop turned into a permanent education space, the KunsthalLAB. In 2026 the whole entrance area was redesigned by Van Oosterom Studio. The Kunsthal says the new interior reflects OMA’s original architecture and joins the entrance, Kunsthal Shop and Kunsthal Café into one area, and that the concrete structures and the ceiling with Günther Förg’s neon artwork were restored as part of the work. The building has become a subject in its own right: Park Books in Zürich published Tibor Pataky’s OMA’s Kunsthal in Rotterdam: Rem Koolhaas and the New Europe in 2023.

For a design guide, the Kunsthal shows an institution whose identity is carried by its architecture: a hall with no collection, a public ramp cut through a square box, a mix of travertine and corrugated plastic, and a black-and-white mark on a ventilation tower drawn from a shipping stamp. Compare the OMA and Stedelijk Museum guides. For this guide we use steel grille, travertine, ramp concrete and signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kunsthal Rotterdam’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.