Nazi Stukas zeroed in on Rotterdam on May 10, 1940, and they did not let up until they had leveled or gutted 11,000 buildings. But well before liberation, an underground city-planning commission went to work drafting plans for the 20th century Rotterdam that is now risen from the ruins.
Latest and handsomest building is the just-completed Bijenkorf ("Beehive") department store, designed by Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained Architect Marcel Breuer (TIME, Oct. 22). Last week its artistic companion piece and focal point was set into place: a massive (36 tons, 80 ft. tall), free-standing sculpture, placed on the sidewalk, that reaches up nearly to the top of the five-story department store. It is the most ambitious and successful combination of modern sculpture and architecture yet attempted.
The Beehive's director, Dr. G. Van der Wai, an unabashed enthusiast for things made in the U.S.A., turned naturally to the U.S. for an architect. Breuer responded with a clear, simple idea: "Essentially a department store is a big, empty box built around a central circulation core, with the walls closed to provide ample storage." In a move away from glass, he sheathed the box in travertine, employing hexagonal forms to give the façade the overall pattern of a honeycomb, set in slit windows (Rotterdam shoppers like to check materials in the sunlight). Here and there he opened up the curtain wall with bands of windows for the interior restaurant and executive offices.
The major problem Architect Breuer had to solve was wished on him by a few fluke misses by the Luftwaffe and the decision of the Rotterdam planning commission to incorporate the beneficiaries of those misses—two surviving buildings—into the pattern of the widened street, making it necessary to bring the building line forward at each street corner. To avoid an L-shaped building, Breuer hit on the idea of letting sculpture take care of the bulge.
For Sculptor Naum Gabo, a near neigh bor of Breuer's in Connecticut, the Bijenkorf commission was the dream of a lifetime. A constructivist (along with his brother, Antoine Pevsner) since the movement's pioneer days in Russia, Gabo still bases his work on the esthetics of mathematics, modern material, and machine motifs. His present work, which took more than a year to construct in steel and aluminum bronze, is as abstract as he has ever done. "I'm not a naturalist," he explains, "who works from a face, a landscape or an event. I have only my imagination. I have tried to express the indomitable spirit of the people of Rotterdam and the miracle of a modern city rising from rubble."
Elsewhere in The Netherlands, Architect Breuer was finding tougher going. His design for a modern U.S. embassy on the linden-tree-shaded Lange Voorhout in The Hague had the conservative Hagenaars up in arms. The building's slab fagade, with its overall pattern and trapezoid-shaped windows topped with matching panels of polished grey granite, looked to one of them like "a sponge cake," and, worst of all, had a suspicious resemblance to Rotterdam's new Bijenkorf.