Rotterdam

Rotterdam lost its heart in fourteen minutes of bombing in May 1940 — and answered with the boldest cityscape in Europe. Zadkine's statue of the "Destroyed City", arms flung skyward with a hole where the heart was, states the wound; everything around it states the reply: the Cube Houses tilted on their corners, the Erasmus Bridge's white swan-neck, the Markthal's horseshoe of apartments arched over a food hall's painted ceiling, the mirrored bowl of the Boijmans art depot — the blitzed city rebuilt as a permanent architecture biennale, working port of Europe's largest harbour all the while, its cranes and container quays running forty kilometres to the sea.

Erasmus was born here, and the city keeps his cool head as patron. Its musical establishment carries full weight: the Rotterdam Philharmonic ranks with Europe's fine orchestras at De Doelen, and the North Sea Jazz Festival — the continent's greatest jazz weekend — fills Ahoy each July. The concert record documents the Luxor Theater: the grand stage in two incarnations, the ornate 1917 house on the Kruiskade and the sweeping new Luxor of 2001 on the Kop van Zuid, where touring opera, musicals and concert productions play beneath the bridge's cables. A hole where the heart was, and a skyline grown through it: Rotterdam is resilience with a design budget.