DUTCH RENAISSANCE

Thanks to the largesse of deep-pocketed backers, a spate of new art museums is springing up in the Netherlands, revving up its status as a must-see cultural destination.

- Words: Julie Belcove

The twisting, swooping swirl of metal, glass, and wood rises from the ground floor of the century-old warehouse, climbs to the second storey, then bursts through the roof, elevating visitors over Rotterdam's historic harbour 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 7,990sqm of dance studios for everything from ballet to hip-hop, with an adjacent 400-seat theatre planned from the ground up; the National Museum of Photography will move into its new home in yet another renovated warehouse this autumn; and Rijnhavenpark, a 22-hectare 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 midsized city that has never been a big draw for leisure travellers. 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?