Kade 14 arrived as 42 concrete cells, each 5.8 metres across, stacked forty metres into the Rotterdam sky with no door big enough to matter. Two consultants had already priced demolition. Both had priced it as a solved problem.
The cells were not the obstacle
A grain cell is a very good room. It is stiff, it is quiet, it has thermal mass measured in days rather than hours, and it has exactly one place where a window wants to go. What it does not have is a way in.
So the entire reuse question collapsed into one question: how do you get people to floor 9 without destroying the thing that makes floor 9 worth having?
One cut, not forty
We cut a single vertical slot through the block, four metres wide, full height, and put the stair and the lift in it. Every cell now opens onto that slot. Nothing else in the structure was touched.
The arithmetic is unglamorous and decisive. Cutting out the cells would have cost roughly €4.1m and released about 1,900 tonnes of embodied carbon. Cutting the slot cost €740,000 and released almost none.
What the structure teaches
The lesson we took to the next three reuse projects is that existing structure is rarely the constraint people describe. It is usually the circulation that is missing, and circulation is cheap compared to concrete.
Ask what the building already does well before asking what it fails to do. In a silo, the answer is: it stands up beautifully, and it will not let you in.
Written by
Maren Ostwald
Founding Partner
Maren founded Rawform in 2011 after eight years on large public commissions. She leads the practice’s civic and cultural work and still draws every project’s first section by hand.
