Boekman & Sons commercial building and conference centre

Various designs were made for the Boekman building on the corner of Delftsestraat and Delftseplein. In November 1954, the well-known Rotterdam architect Hugh Maaskant designed a four-floor cube-shaped commercial building that aligned with the other structures on Delftsestraat. The ground floor was largely blind and contained spaces for deliveries and storage. The planar facade featured strong horizontal lines of breastwork. After this scheme came a design that combined a hotel and restaurant on the third and fourth floor, with showrooms on the ground floor. Completed in February 1955, the definitive design contained not only offices for Boekman and Klingelnberg Klauss but also a conference centre. A screen of precast concrete fins suspended in front of the third floor provided solar shading. The front and lower surfaces of the building were painted white, with the upper surface covered in grey tiles. Apart from that, the facades were simple: a painted concrete skeleton wooden panels and steel frames, and breastwork of opaque black plate glass

The first pile was driven into the ground on 14 August 1956, and the flag was raised on 28 June 1957 when the highest point of construction was reached. Mr. Linde, vice-chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, opened the building on 10 December 1957. Boekman & Sons occupied office space on the first floor and had an entrance on Delftsestraat; Klingelnberg-Klaus had its entrance and a showroom on Delftseplein, and also offices on the first and second floors. The building featured two works of art by Bas van der Smit: ‘Uprooting Machines’ in the sales area and ‘Dock Workers’ in the showroom.

A week later, Alderman Meertens opened the conference centre. The rooms were managed by L.R. van Hecke, a company that ran fourteen restaurants in various parts of the city.

The conference centre relocated to Henegouwerlaan in 1965, by which time Boekman had already moved to Amersfoort. The machine business with its showroom and offices remained. The building was then converted into a telegraph office for the state postal and telegraph service. This service was based in the main post office on Coolsingel, but it needed more space as telegraph communication grew. It was a practical location, close to the Railway Post Office. The service’s mopeds and scooters could be stored in the nearby RAC Garage. In August 1966, the state telegraph office relocated overnight, because the telegram service had to continue uninterrupted.

In 1980 the telegraph service moved out of the building, after which it was then rented by various businesses. When proposals for a new Centraal Station and surroundings took shape around 2000, the fate of the building seemed to be sealed. But Will Alsop’s ambitious plans for champagne glasses and a new railway station with high-rise development in the Schiekadeblok were scrapped. Moreover, the envisaged 240,000 square metres of state-of-the-art office space in the Central District never materialized because of the credit crisis. Even a modest first step by property developer LSI to replace the Boekman building with the Intercity Hotel in 2014 flopped. In the meantime, the creative class and café business had discovered this building, and others like it in the area. After espresso bar Lungo, located here until 2015, this attractive venue became a hamburger joint called Burgertrut in 2017.