History of Stadium Feyenoord

The district of Rotterdam, after which the footballclub and the stadium were named, is a rather dreary 19th century neighbourhood. It was built, together with the first harbours on the south bank, between 1870 and 1910, and because of its lack of amenities, it remained unpopular for a long time. Teenagers from the working-class population founded the football-club in 1908. Because it had several good players on its teams, the new club was quite successful: between 1923 and 1933 it won eight times the championship of its district and twice the national championship. Partly through this success and partly because of the lack of other recreational facilities on the south bank, the games of the Feijenoord footballclub drew bigger and bigger crowds. The board of the club started therefore thinking about a stadium in 1931, in the hardest years of the financial crisis.

The huge stadium was built on the vision (see the vision come alive) and conviction of one man, Leen van Zandvliet, president of the club. Many of the 600 members of his club were out of work; few shared his optimism and practically none his dog-like tenacity.

An appeal to the city council for financial guarantees was turned down. The city was itself in dire straits, and had reduced the number of its employees. The city required the footballclub to pay for the streets and sewers around the sta-dium as a condition for the issuing of a building permit. Van Zandvliet then got outside help. A petition by the leading merchants and industrialists of Rotterdam to the city council caused this condition to he revoked. One of the more powerful merchants, D.G. van Beuningen, gave strong support to the plan by giving a loan to the footballclub and by inducing Ills friends to guarantee the sale of shares of the new stadium; as only 15% of the shares were sold at the emission, they had to take the rest. The contractor and the architects were partly paid in shares.
The first sketches for the stadium were made in 1931 by Jan Wils, the architect of the Amster-dam stadium of 1928. Local chauvinism and criticism of the stadium at Amsterdam, led to the choice of a Rotterdam architectural firm in 1934.
J. A. Brinkman and L. C. van der Vlugt were chosen because the board of the footballclub liked the Van Nelle factory.

Van Zandvliet proposed to build the entire stadium with two decks. Other board members and the architects became enthusiastic for this idea when they saw the new stand at the Arsenal stadium in Highbury, London. Another feature of this stadium was also adopted in Rotterdam the level of the field was raised app. three feet in relation to the groundfloor of the stadium in order to reduce the slant of the decks.

The architects belonged to the functionalist school which put the practical requirements of the brief first and foremost. Consequently, Brinkman and Van der Vlugt aimed at designing a stadium where one could have an uninterrupted view of the whole field from everyone of its 61.000 seats. Sketches of the section soon showed that the upper deck would have to move back from the lower one, in order not to get too steep a slant. Interior columns were avoided because they would obstruct vision.
The stadium was designed in steel, which was less expensive than concrete at that time The architect's design for the steel trusses was maintained in outline, but the position and direction of the members was changed by the steel construction firm (see the differences between the drawn perspective and the photograph). Although a second deck of seats had been used before, the carrying of such a deck all round tile field was something new. Another innovation was the provision of toilets and refreshment-bars just below this deck.
The delight in showing the trusses and stair-cases is due to the current functionalistic idiom. Exterior trusses had been used by the architects on the house for the director of the Van Nelle factory and most spectacularly by Le Corbusier in his project for the Soviet palace of 1931; they derive from the visible trusses in Berlage's Am-sterdam Exchange said ultimately from tile great railroad sheds. Exterior Staircases were greatly en vogue in the twenties: they were used by Mendelsohn, Le Corbisier, Breuer and Duiker, and by Brinkman and Van der Vlugt in die Van Nelle factory. They go back to the designs of Sant' Elia and beyond that to Gropius' and Meyer's Werkbund factory of 1914. The immaterial, "light" appearance of the building is partly due to economy, but it was also deliberately sought after. Its formal sources are tine train sheds again, the Eiffel tower; and ultimately that monument of anti-monumentality, the Crystal palace.

A view on how the stadium looks like after the renovation that took place in 1994 can be viewed on the following links: Fotogalery and Flash-presentation of the renovation

Feijenoord homepage / De Kuip (Dutch version) / Fotogalery / sitemap history / European Tour

Source: 'De bouw van het stadion Feijenoord' door N. Luning Prak; overdruk uit Bulletin van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond, jaargang 69, aflevering 4, 1970

Bas Production 1998