Het mooiste zwembad van Rotterdam

The Van Maanenbad is the most beautiful swimming pool in all of Rotterdam. I think so, anyway. They keep their steam bath hot, and charge only three euros to swim for an hour each afternoon. I see my neighbors there, but they are difficult to recognize, especially in the steam bath, where billowing clouds obscure anything more than an arm's length away. In the pool I am too busy swimming to look at anyone. The 1930s-era building was designed by J.H. de Roos and W.F. Overeijnder (who also gave Rotterdam its beautiful Sparta soccer stadium, and Den Haag its unusual "Rode Olifant" office building). It fronts a green and peaceful courtyard, hemmed in by five-story brick apartments, with an outdoor pool in the courtyard (alas closed now). The indoor pool is broad and deep, its small cafe cozy and plain, and I am happy there. The beauty of Van Maanenbad is in its social mix.

Rotterdam's polyglot nature is evident in the steam bath. We discuss the weather, politics, royalty, and the city. Most of the conversations are in Dutch, but there are always one or two sub-conversations in other languages, including my native English. The bodies are varying shades from pale pink to dark, chocolate brown, and they are squat or long, wide or thin, tall or short, active or laconic. We sit in a tight circle on the molded plastic bench, our legs pointed toward the center. The Dutch of the Van Maanenbad, so far as I can tell in the steam, come in every size, shape, and color. Conversation is lively and interesting. Recently, the subject was architecture.

Someone asked, "what is the most beautiful building in Rotterdam?" I spoke up for Het Groothandelsgebouw, my favorite. "And you can drive your car to any office inside," a tall, pale, pear-shaped man added. "The Laurenskerk is the most beautiful, though," a low, spreading lady, pink as a rose, said in Dutch. "Echt mooi." A thin, long blade of brown said he preferred the Erasmus Bridge. "But is it a building?" I asked. "As much so as De Rotterdam," he answered, and laughter came from all around the steamy ring. "I find De Rotterdam beautiful," I said in Dutch.

My Dutch is poor. Speaking it out loud seems to convince others that English would be preferable. "De Rotterdam is terrible," the pear-shaped man who likes to drive his car to the office announced. "It is a cynical monument to greed." He was showing off his English, probably reciting something he'd read. I'd seen a similar criticism in the newspaper. "I don't like new buildings," the rose-pink lady sighed. "Why?" I asked. "I like old buildings," she explained. "De Rotterdam is too small." The thin long fellow, fond of bridges, said. "It looks like Madurodam." Laughter all around. "Jammer," agreed another broad, pink rose, near enough to me that I could see her nicotine patch wilting in the steam. "Het is echt zo. De hele Kop van Zuid is alsof je naar Madurodam kijkt."

It's true. Rotterdam sometimes looks like Madurodam—especially in the Kop van Zuid, the mishmash of towers that stand on display on the south shore of the Maas River by the Erasmus Bridge. The monuments there, including De Rotterdam, look like scale models. But the pear-shaped driver did not agree. "No, no. De Rotterdam is precisely too big," he insisted. "No one needs all that office space. It is wasteful and insulting." "Koolhaas," muttered a squat mound of coffee ice-cream. "Koolhaas," the pink roses sighed in unison, clicking and clacking comiserably. "No!" the scissoring blade corrected. "It is precisely too small. You are objecting to its morality; I'm talking about the quality of the architecture."

His parsing pricked my ears. "How big should it be?" I asked. "As big as the World Trade Center," he said. "It's a beautiful building, like the World Trade Center broken into pieces and put back together. But it's far too small. It is a maquette, a model for a brilliant piece of architecture."

At home I looked at pictures and figures on the internet, and I found that he was right. De Rotterdam should be as big as the World Trade Center's twin towers. You might have thought the twin towers were destroyed on 9/11. But capital can never be destroyed. It simply reassembles itself, somewhere else, and keeps on growing. That is the brilliance of De Rotterdam. The building needs to match or exceed the size of the disappeared towers. That is, De Rotterdam should be at least five-times bigger than it is.

"Any responsible architect would never make a building that big here," the stubborn pear-shaped man insisted. This actually made me laugh out loud. "You mean a 'responsible community activist' would never make a building that big," I said. "I'm not sure what a 'responsible architect' even is." "I think we can all agree about De Rotterdam," the interesting young man who likes bridges concluded, "that a better community activist would have made a much smaller building, and a better architect would have made a much bigger one."