Forget Van Gogh. These New Museums Want to Make the Netherlands a Modern Art Hub.

The twisting, swooping swirl of metal, glass, and wood rises from the ground floor of the century-old warehouse, climbs to the second story, then bursts through the roof, elevating visitors over Rotterdam’s historic harbor in a double helix that does double duty as both staircase and artwork. That the Tornado, cantilevered atop the new Fenix museum, looks like it could be an amusement-park thrill ride is no accident: Its Instagram-worthiness is baked into a plan to put this 700-year-old city on the metaphorical map. 

Right next door to Fenix, which opened in May and tells the story of human migration through the lens of art, an empty storage facility is being transformed into 86,000 square feet of dance studios for every- thing from ballet to hip-hop, with an adjacent 400-seat theater planned from the ground up; the National Museum of Photography will move into its new home in yet another renovated warehouse this fall; and Rijnhavenpark, a 54-acre green space and beach designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh—the vaunted landscape architect behind Brooklyn Bridge Park and scores of other high-profile redevelopments—is rising on the shared waterfront along the Nieuwe Maas River. It’s an ambitious slate of projects for a midsize city that has never been a big draw for leisure travelers. And one billionaire family is footing the bill. 

The van der Vorm clan’s simple-to-grasp but possibly complicated-to-achieve goal is to transform their hometown into a cultural magnet. It has been done before: Second- or even third-tier cities becoming must-see destinations thanks almost entirely to iconic art and design. Who among us can honestly say they’d ever even heard of Bilbao, Spain, before Frank Gehry erected an audacious Guggenheim Museum there? 

But Rotterdam has always lived in the shadow of its more glamorous neighbor to the north, Amsterdam, whose art trifecta of the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, and the Van Gogh Museum offer stiff competition, as do its charming canals and old-world architecture. Adding to the challenge: The Hartwig Art Foundation, backed by Rob Defares, another Dutch billionaire, is building a new contemporary-art museum in Amsterdam. And just outside the capital, in Zaanstad, art-world veteran Ernest Mourmans and real-estate developer Serge Hannecart are converting a former military base into a vast museum campus, set to open—and to steal a bit of Rotterdam’s thunder—in 2026. 

Still, the upstart’s proven grit and apparent openness to change may improve its chances for success. The city was flattened during World War II, when some 80,000 Rotterdammers were left homeless after a single night of the German air raids. Unlike, say, Munich, which voted to faithfully replicate its devastated old town, Rotterdam embraced modernity, akin to Chicago after the Great Fire. A glass-and-steel skyline conjured by such local mega talent as Rem Koolhaas and MVRDV now encircles the port, the largest in Europe—and the original source of the van der Vorms’ abundant wealth. 

The family amassed its fortune from the Holland America Line, which transported millions of immigrants across the Atlantic to North America beginning in the 1870s. After selling it to Carnival Corp. for roughly $625 million in 1988, the van der Vorms established HAL Investments, which scored even bigger paydays by diversifying into such categories as eye-glasses; they pocketed an estimated $4 billion from the sale of GrandVision to EssilorLuxottica in 2019. 

Over the years, they have dedicated a sizable chunk of their assets to charity. Today, their philanthropic reach is matched only by their desire for privacy. In keeping with Dutch culture, they maintain a very low profile, living intentionally normal lives and turning down all requests for interviews. But their beneficence has spoken volumes about their values. The van der Vorms’ first foundation, De Verre Bergen, is dedicated to social welfare, health, and education in Rotterdam. In one major push, it provided rental homes to over 200 refugee families from Syria. Careful to avoid pricing out locals by disrupting the real-estate market, the foundation limited its acquisitions to properties that had been for sale for at least several months. 

In 2016, Wim Pijbes, a seasoned museum director who’d ushered the Rijksmuseum through a 10-year renovation and expansion before becoming a consultant, got a call from Martijn van der Vorm inviting him to coffee. When they met up, van der Vorm explained that De Verre Bergen often received grant requests from arts organizations, and he wanted to start a separate foundation to help them. He asked Pijbes to take the helm. 

“I like him,” Pijbes says of van der Vorm, sitting in an office at Fenix with a view of the harbor as well as the museum’s interior. “I like his highly visionary approach: Make it really good so that it can last for a hundred years—or 3,000 years—so a long-term view. And of course, there are the means to do it. We never talk [publicly] about the budget, but it’s not a small foundation. We can really do big things.” 

Take its donation to the National Museum of Photography. “They knew that our big dream was having our own building,” says Birgit Donker, its director, adding that the institution, which holds 6.5 million objects in its collection, was even considering leaving Rotterdam. When Pijbes heard about the museum’s straits, the foundation suggested it buy and renovate a local eight-story former coffee warehouse—courtesy of a roughly $46 million gift, which Donker calls the largest ever to a cultural institution in the country. “I had to pinch my arm the first time I was there: ‘What’s happening?’ They really enabled this.” 

But before that opportunity presented itself, Pijbes hit upon the idea of creating a museum from scratch only after being disappointed with the modest proposals put forth by existing cultural nonprofits. “Almost every person said, ‘We need 20,000 [euros] for our next book,’ or, ‘We need 50,000 for our next exhibition,’ ” Pijbes recalls. “That doesn’t move the needle. After dozens of discussions, I said, ‘We’re looking for something bigger. What would you do if we give 1 million? Or 10 million?’ No clue. 

“Okay, I can imagine that,” he continues, allowing that the interviewees were probably stunned by the trail of zeros. But when not a single potential recipient followed up with any ideas, Pijbes decided, in the spirit of the new foundation’s name, Droom en Daad—Dream and Deed—to be proactive. He began scouring the city, but without a clear plan for what he’d do. 

In February 2017, he came across a derelict former warehouse on the harbor. The space was enormous, spanning more than 172,000 square feet. The way he tells it, once he found his way to the second floor, stood out on the balcony, and looked across the water, he had the answer. There he gazed upon the Pier of Tears—so named because millions of immigrants said their final goodbyes to loved ones on that dock before departing for the New World—and, behind it, the onetime headquarters of Holland America. The structure itself, built in 1923, was even part of the shipping line’s operations. A museum about migration right in the spot where so much of it happened felt like kismet. 

So did the prospect of hiring an Asian architect, considering the fact that the building is in a neighborhood called Katendrecht, the site of continental Europe’s first Chinatown. When Pijbes soon attended a symposium and was impressed by fellow panelist Ma Yansong, he asked the founder of the buzzy Beijing-based MAD Architects, “Do you have time to make a museum?” and invited the rising star to Rotterdam. 

Ma thought Pijbes was “just being polite,” he tells Robb Report on the terrace of the Nieuwe Instituut, a center for architecture, design, and digital culture that, in a convenient bit of cross-pollination, unveiled a show dedicated to Ma’s inventive two-decade career the same week that Fenix opened its doors. “But at the same time, I was really hoping to do something in Europe,” he adds. “We’re the only Chinese architects doing work overseas.” 

Ma, who is also behind the much-anticipated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, came up with exactly one idea to present to Pijbes: a shiny, undulating sculpture-as-staircase. That was enough. It was meant to symbolize movement, he explained—and visitors would see their own progression reflected back at them as they chose which of multiple routes to take upward. “You wonder which way to go,” he says. “And then, when you walk through, there is the experience that you imagine—the journey, the time, the history— and you look at yourself in the steel, [which is] still more like an artistic experience, and then you suddenly go through the roof. So, it’s a lot of emotion.” 

For Ma, who lived in the U.S. while earning his master’s degree at Yale and has traveled frequently to Rotterdam to work on Fenix, the museum’s theme hit home. “Step by step, the narrative of migration means more and more to me,” he says. Droom en Daad also signed MAD to conceive the new Danshuis, slated for completion in 2030. Opportunities for dancers with disparate disciplines to interact are often limited, so Ma hopes to lean into transparency. “Inside is all glass,” he says of his initial plan, “so they can see each other.” 

Typically, when a maverick philanthropist sets out to build a museum, the primary purpose is to house their private collection. (Think Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney or, more recently, Eli Broad.) Fenix, however, began with nothing more than a theme—and a hefty bank account. Pijbes and the director he designated, Anne Kremers, quickly began to shop for art both new and old all over the world. 

They made their first acquisition at Frieze New York in 2018: Alfredo Jaar’s (Kindness) of (Strangers), a wall piece of neon arrows depicting the circuitous migration routes that were commonly traveled in 2015, the year it was made. They later purchased scores of other works, among them Gordon Parks’s photographs of segregation in the U.S., one of Danh Võ’s 350 fragments of a re-created and chopped-up Statue of Liberty, and two oil portraits of African sailors in the merchant city of Leiden by 17th-century Dutch painter Jan van Staveren. The foundation also commissioned works, such as a series of 116 doll-size likenesses of Rotterdammers sculpted in modeling clay by Efrat Zehavi as she chatted with her diverse subjects on the streets of the city. 

The opening of this place and the timing of it—it’s very charged. Art is all about timing.

– Filmmaker Steve McQueen on Fenix

Historical artifacts—from a blueprint of a slave ship to a graffitied chunk of the Berlin Wall—pepper the primary inaugural exhibition as well. But the object that, for Pijbes, best encapsulates the bravery of so many who cross borders is a subpar boat on long-term loan from the Italian government, which confiscated it from migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to the island of Lampedusa. “I saw all these ships, all the clothing, all the empty bottles, all the blankets—they were still on the ships,” he recalls. “It’s kind of witnessing their horrible journey. So, I said, ‘Shit. I feel [like] an intruder in the personal stories of people.’ I don’t know what happened on these boats, what kind of traumas have taken place. People might have died or drowned.” Pijbes pauses, choking up. “So, my gosh, then it really came very close.” 

At the same time, he was weary of focusing exclusively on despair. “You don’t want to have only misery,” he says, especially when hope is often the driving emotion of people leaving their homeland. The fraught position so many migrants now find themselves in is on the minds of the artists who turn out for an opening party, many having experienced the same unease firsthand. “I know the violence of a border,” says Omar Victor Diop, who lives in Paris but as a Senegalese artist is routinely subjected to rigorous visa processes when he wants to travel. “There’s always the suspicion you’ll want to stay because you come from a worse place. It’s pretty humiliating.” 

As hors d’oeuvres from Fenix’s restaurant, O, created by Michelin two-star Turkish chef Maksut Aşkar, are passed and a few guests begin to dance to the D.J.’s beats, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen, the British son of Caribbean immigrants, contemplates the zeitgeist. “The opening of this place and the timing of it—it’s very charged,” says McQueen, who has a neon artwork on view. “Art is all about timing.”

On a sunny morning in Amsterdam, Ernest Mourmans pulls up to the De L’Europe hotel in his Bentley Continental, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. About 20 minutes later, we turn in to a decommissioned army installation in Zaandam, a city whose claim to fame heretofore has been a clutch of historic windmills along the river Zaan. For the past five years or so, he and developer Serge Hannecart have been quietly converting much of the former military base and munitions factory into a sprawling showcase for contemporary art, and I am getting a sneak peek. Each artist will have their own building, with about 21,500 square feet to fill beneath ceilings that soar up to 45 feet high. Think the Dutch version of Marfa, Texas, Donald Judd’s ode to Minimalism. But instead of a dusty desertscape in the middle of nowhere, the waterside Zaanstad Amsterdam Museum (ZAMU) is surrounded by lush gardens designed by Piet Oudolf, renowned for the High Line park in New York City and whom Mourmans has known for decades; so far, he has planted 20,000 bulbs. The plan is for regularly scheduled boats to ferry visitors directly from Amsterdam to the ZAMU dock in just 15 minutes. This being the Netherlands, plenty of cyclists are also expected. 

Opening in the first half of 2026 will be pavilions for John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and KAWS. Several other big-time names have visited the roughly 99-acre campus and called dibs on the cavernous spaces, in many cases planning to produce new site-specific pieces, but Mourmans is not ready to reveal their identities publicly. ZAMU’s blueprints call for an eventual 15 to 20 permanent installations, as well as restaurants and bars. 

An architect by training, Mourmans has amassed a trove of works by collaborating closely with Chamberlain, Frank Stella, and others to produce their monumental sculptures during their lifetimes. “For me, it’s important to keep the collection together, so it doesn’t disappear in all directions—three here, four there,” he says. “I’m going to make sure nothing will leave here. It will stay forever.” 

He has fabricated KAWS’s immense wooden pieces that riff on animated characters for about 12 years. “Ernest is a fascinating guy, and he’s a perfectionist,” Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, tells me over the phone. “I know if he’s doing it, it’s going to be great. But it sounded like such a giant task, it was hard to get my head around.” Eventually, he managed: A new sculpture, the largest wooden KAWS piece to date, will be so monumental, it must be built inside the pavilion. If it’s not completed by the opening date, visitors will be able to observe its assembly. 

ZAMU is teaming with the other artists or estates to curate their pavilions as well. While also operating More Gallery, an exhibition space in a former turbine hall near Lucerne, Switzerland, Mourmans has been orchestrating the renovations himself with an eye toward sustainability. The museum will rely almost exclusively on natural light. Mourmans takes me into Chamberlain’s space, where he finished installing 19 hulking sculptures last year (it’s exceedingly rare for a museum to have more than one or two) and where the new Rosewood Amsterdam hotel is hosting a V.I.P. dinner the following night. Most of the artworks are iterations of the Abstract Expressionist’s signature style, achieved by crushing automobiles, then fitting the parts together like pieces of a puzzle for which only he knew the solution. Also on view are some of his “Foils,” massively scaled-up versions of tiny three-dimensional doodles made by scrunching and twisting aluminum foil. Improvised though they may appear, Chamberlain was a stickler for precision: An assistant was tasked with hand-counting the nubs to ensure the number precisely matched that of the maquette. “He had it completely in his head,” Mourmans says of the artist’s vision. “Here, you come, you understand Chamberlain, you understand his language.” 

Mourmans and Pijbes aren’t the only ones rethinking what a museum can be in the 21st century. With the backing of electronic-trading mogul Rob Defares and starry advisers like Rem Koolhaas, veteran museum director Beatrix Ruf is turning a former Amsterdam courthouse into a nearly 215,000-square-foot total art ecosystem, containing not only exhibition galleries but also workshops, performance and rehearsal spaces, offices for other cultural nonprofits, restaurants, and short-term-stay apartments. Ruf likens the Hartwig Museum to the Library of Alexandria, an institution as “public civil engagement.” 

“What we want to bring back is, not everything in a museum has to be exploited,” she says. Construction is expected to continue until 2028, so in the meantime, the Hartwig opened a temporary space across the street this summer and has been busy with its numerous other programs, including collaborating with artists internationally to produce work, donating that work to the Dutch state, and partnering with Performa, the New York–based performance-art festival. 

As she talks about the Hartwig, Ruf is also very curious to hear about ZAMU and Fenix, as well as Droom en Daad’s broader efforts to remake Rotterdam. Noting that many of the premier museums of Europe were founded by visionary philanthropists, she says, “It might be we’re in a phase like that.” 

Competition seems the furthest thing from her mind. “It’s great. Nothing against it at all,” she says of the other projects. “More, always more.” 

Where to Stay

Rotterdam’s cultural relevance may be on the upswing, but the city still lacks five-star accommodations. There are some novelty options: the four-star Hotel New York, which occupies the former Holland America shipping-line headquarters opposite Fenix; Wikkelboats floating cabins in the harbor; and short-stay apartments atop the National Museum of Photography, which have already begun renting. But visitors seeking luxury digs are better off making Rotterdam a day trip and sleeping in style in Amsterdam. 

There, the De L’Europe Amsterdam (top) has long been the grande dame. Opened in 1896 and owned by the Heineken family since the 1950s, it offers top-notch service in a hushed atmosphere defined by centuries-old oil paintings and marble bathrooms. Just over half of the 107 guest rooms are suites. Book a table at its elegantly renovated Michelin two-star Flore and enter through the kitchen before feasting on a botanical-focused tasting menu that is as exquisitely presented as it is prepared. 

Competition arrived in May, when the Rosewood Amsterdam opened its doors in the former Palace of Justice after a fastidious 10-year renovation that reportedly cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The vibe is high contemporary, with a display of art commensurate with the reputation of the Cheng family of collectors who own the Rosewood Hotel Group. The lobby, for instance, features a pair of shaped canvases by Frank Stella (one of them, above), while a large Sterling Ruby hangs over a staircase, and Grandmother, a Maarten Baas “Real Time” clock with no hands, stands in the reception area. 

Chic locals are dining on the terrace of the restaurant Eeuwen on the bright afternoon I eat there, and Advocatuur, the Rosewood’s glamorous India-inflected bar, is buzzing by 6 p.m. The still that produces the hotel’s proprietary jenever—the precursor to gin—marks the entrance to an intimate speakeasy (above). And if you imbibe a bit too much while there, book a treatment at the serene spa the next morning.