What can you buy at Markthal?
The Markthal opened in 2014 and instantly became Rotterdam's most recognizable new building. Designed by MVRDV architects, it takes an audacious concept — a covered food market combined with residential apartments — and executes it at enormous scale. The building's horseshoe arch rises 40 meters above a ground-floor market containing nearly 100 food stalls and restaurants, while 228 apartments are built into the arch itself, their windows looking outward over the city and inward over the market below.
The interior ceiling is covered by "Horn of Plenty," a digital artwork by Arno Coenen and Iris Roskam spanning 11,000 square meters — oversized fruits, flowers, vegetables, insects, and fish swim across the curved surface in vivid color, earning comparisons to the Sistine Chapel that locals consider both flattering and slightly absurd. The market beneath operates as both tourist spectacle and genuine food hall. Dutch cheese merchants, Surinamese roti vendors, Spanish ham cutters, Turkish bakeries, and Japanese noodle bars compete for attention alongside specialist olive oil shops, craft beer taprooms, and a fishmonger whose herring sandwiches draw lunchtime queues from nearby offices. The building sits atop archaeological remains of a medieval settlement — excavated ruins are visible through the glass floor near the market entrance, layering Rotterdam's wartime erasure and medieval past beneath its aggressively contemporary present. A guide explains the engineering challenge of building apartments around a market (noise and smell management required creative solutions), the debate the building provoked about what a market should be, and how the Markthal anchors the broader architectural ensemble around Blaak station that includes the nearby Cube Houses.