Atlanta

Brief Information

On Coolsingel, Atlanta appeared as a noticeably taller building than the neighboring structures: at 36 meters, with a concrete frame, the hotel became an early vertical accent on the street. It was built in 1929–1931 in the Art Deco style, and its layout divided functions by height from the outset: the eight upper floors were occupied by the hotel, while the ground floor was given over to a café-restaurant.

The main shift in how the building is perceived is connected not with the hotel’s luxury, but with survival and layers of change. Atlanta survived the bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940, then received new wings and became a municipal monument in 1998. This is why the place should be read as a rare pre-war fragment of the city, to which later decades were quite literally added.

What to Notice First

It is worth comparing the old part of the building with the two extensions. The 1950 wing on the Aert van Nesstraat side was made outwardly in the same style as the main block, so it continues the hotel’s pre-war image. The 1965 extension on the Coolsingel side, by contrast, is assembled from concrete panels and differs sharply from the rest of Atlanta. This helps one see not a single “historic shell,” but a building that was altered without completely erasing its earlier appearance.

The ground floor is important too. Initially it housed a café-restaurant, and now it is occupied by the Chinese restaurant Grand Garden. Because of this, the lower level reads as the public part of the building, while the upper floors retain their hotel function. A separate detail for comparison is the interior of the floors, maintained in the style of the 1930s: it connects the present-day hotel with the time of its construction more strongly than a simple date on an information plaque.