A decommissioned grain silo becomes a vertical farm and food hall on Rotterdam's harbour edge

For sixty years the Maashaven silo did one thing: hold grain. Its new life asks it to do almost everything at once. Atelier Waal's conversion stacks a public food hall, two restaurants and eleven storeys of hydroponic growing towers inside the original concrete drum, leaving the exterior almost untouched apart from a ring of new glazing at street level.

The founding move was restraint. Rather than carving the silo open, the architects treated its 40-metre void as the project's main material. Visitors enter beneath the raw funnel-shaped hoppers that once dispensed grain onto barges; the tapering geometry now directs daylight from a new oculus down to the hall floor.

Circulation wraps the perimeter in a gentle spiral, so diners pass the growing towers on their way up — a deliberate bit of theatre. 'We wanted the supply chain to be the interior,' says founding partner Jesse Waal. 'You watch your salad being harvested two floors above your table.'

‘We wanted the supply chain to be the interior. You watch your salad being harvested two floors above your table.’

Material choices stay within the building's industrial register: reused steel grating, untreated ash joinery, and acoustic panels pressed from spent barley husks sourced from a brewery across the harbour. Nothing is painted; everything is bolted rather than glued, so the fit-out can be dismantled as cleanly as it arrived.

The project makes a broader argument about hospitality's next decade. As food miles come under scrutiny, restaurants are becoming producers as well as servers — and heavyweight industrial shells, too stubborn to demolish, may be the ideal hosts.