The Dutch city of Rotterdam is celebrating its innovative architectural heritage this summer. Dan Hayes reports

As we step on to Weena, the wind stops us in our tracks. This is a concrete canyon of a street, with six lanes of traffic and two tram lines running west to east through central Rotterdam and a wind tunnel on a day like this.

Still, at least it is not raining, which is as well because I am craning my neck upwards to get a good look at the architectural variety that flanks the street – the Unilever Building with its cantilevered roof, the 151m Delftse Poort skyscraper and a mighty office block belonging to oil company Shell.

‘Now you can see why we call it the windy city,’ says my guide, local historian Peter de Konig. ‘Just imagine what it’s like trying to ride down here on a bike in the middle of winter.’

You must have to pedal hard. Or hang on tight, depending on the direction of travel. Baggy clothing would be an unwise choice Weena can be a stark introduction to Rotterdam. On a grey, wet day you might be tempted to turn straight back into the Centraal Station and take the first train to somewhere with a more traditional Dutch ambience: Amsterdam, perhaps, or Delft, or Utrecht.

If you were to do that, however, you would be missing out on one of the most comprehensive selections of modern architecture in the world – something that the city is promoting this year under the title Rotterdam 2007: City of Architecture. Throughout town, there has been an outbreak of purple – on buses, bridges and (in particular) buildings. Some 40 of the latter are currently adorned with the colour, denoting their place on an architectural tour of the city, entitled Sites & Stories, which can be downloaded to an MP3 player.

Pieter Kuster, project leader for Rotterdam 2007: City of Architecture, says: ‘We wanted to give an overview of 100 years of modern architecture – something with which the city is exceptionally gifted. We’re not trying to identify the 40 best buildings in the city, though – it’s more about showing different approaches to architecture.’

Back on the windswept Weena, there is a striking example of this in action. The Wholesale Building (Groothandelsgebouw) is a concrete behemoth, 220m long and 84m wide, complete with a 1.5km road running through the centre. If you did not know better, you might not spare it a second glance and just dismiss it as a misguided concrete monster from the postwar austerity period.

The architect of the building was Hugh Maaskant, one of the driving forces behind the reconstruction of Rotterdam following the destruction of its centre in a bombing raid on 14 May 1940. His aim was to set the bar for the scale of the future city – something the Wholesale Building certainly did – and provide a one-stop shop for those working to rebuild a country scarred by war.

It is probably also fair to say that Maaskant took a different view on Rotterdam’s destruction than did most of its other residents. Speaking many years later, he said: ‘If as an architect, during the most conscious period of your life, you can experience the reconstruction of your own city, you are a privileged person.

‘When I saw the inner city the morning after the fire, I thought Rotterdam was greater than ever – a city that had suffered. Many Rotterdammers probably had only one wish then – to see the city that was the backdrop to their youth rebuilt like it once was. Now, only one generation later, hardly anybody remembers what the city used to be like and it’s certain that nobody wants it back.’

Perhaps not everyone today would agree with Maaskant, but Rotterdam is certainly making the most of its architectural assets with Sites & Stories. ‘We didn’t want it all just to be about architecture,’ Kuster adds. ‘We wanted to give an idea of the period when places were built and to let people find out more about the human stories related to them.’

Fast-forward your audio guide to track five, for example, and you find out about one of the city’s signature sites – the 1927- built De Hef Railway Lifting Bridge. After a brief preamble about the engineering involved in the project, along comes Lou Vlasblom, who hit the headlines by jumping off the highest point of the bridge (for fun) on 14 January 1933.

In the English version, Vlasblom explains all – in a cockney accent – to a very Dutch-sounding interviewer. ‘A few people fainted, of course. I ’ad to push off hard to avoid the piers, otherwise… you land on the piers and there isn’t much of you left then, is there? It was me ’obby. Without greasing up.’

The tour does not just focus on the positive elements of buildings, either. Thus we discover the City Hall, built in the 1920s, was bound up with controversy; people were appalled that the contract to design it was given to Henri Evers, following a competition that was supposedly fixed by the then-mayor, oneAlfred R Zimmerman.

After the tower blocks of Weena a few metres away, the traditionalism of the city hall provides a complete contrast. ‘I really like it,’ says historian de Konig. ‘It’s looks a bit like a French château, but then it’s got that staircase façade like old Dutch houses. When it was built much of the surrounding area was a field. The mayor liked the idea that coming from the west you’d see this big building, but he also had a plan to solve a social problem and build a city hall all at the same time. In the 1920s this was the red-light district and well known as a pretty rough place. That was all knocked down when they built this.

‘In Dutch there is only one letter difference between the word for whore [hoer] and the word for gentleman [heer]. At the time there was a song about the whores moving out and the gents moving in – and the mayor having his office in what had been the boudoir of a prostitute.’

Essentially a walking tour, Sites & Stories focuses on a relatively small area of the city, but there is no shortage of architectural variety. After the city hall we head down Coolsingel, past the brutalist-looking 1950s De Bijenkorf department store and the purple-striped glass pinnacle of the World Trade Centre to an altogether more intimate space, Piet Blom’s oft-photographed Cube Houses, built between 1978 and 1984.

One of these is open to visitors. You pay your €2 and climb up a cramped staircase into a remarkably spacious living area, where windows look up towards the sky and down towards the street. Blom said he had an aversion to living in conventional houses and was particularly unenthused by the numerous apartment blocks of Rotterdam. ‘I hope to make a sanctuary in this businesslike, sometimes rather crude city,’ he once commented

The open house does feel a little like a sanctuary, albeit one with thirsty plants and an unexpected and vast collection of Lord of the Rings figurines. You cannot help thinking it would probably be fun to live in a Cube House – if you did not mind sweeping out corners.

‘The Cube Houses are on our list for all sorts of reasons,’ says Kuster. ‘Of course they’re interesting to look at and they demonstrate a different approach to modern living, but it’s more than that. They illustrate how you can start with a small space and then build out to create something intimate and exceptional.’

We are only 10 minutes’ walk distant, but we suddenly feel a long way from Weena.