The Building at Witte de Withstraat 50: From Girls’ School to Kunstinstituut Melly
WORM and Melly are friends, neighbours and cultural partners. As participants in the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) Theory of Change project, where we explore how we can measure our socio-cultural impact, (bringing benefit to Rotterdam along the way), we decided that working together is the way forward in understanding what we do, and how we can move forward as cultural institutions. This first meant understanding the street we are situated on, and our respective histories. Melly’s Jeroen Laven concludes a series of articles with a short history of our street and our respective buildings.
The stately brick building at Witte de Withstraat 50, home to Kunstinstituut Melly today, was originally constructed in the 1870s as a public girls’ school. Designed by municipal architect C.B. van der Tak, the building was part of the early development of the street after the botanical garden made way for the new city plan. It opened as a Hogere Burgerschool for meisjes (a higher secondary school for girls) around 1872, signalling the progressive intentions for women’s education in Rotterdam at that time.
The building served as an educational facility for over a century. Generations of young women passed through its halls, and its identity as a place of learning made a lasting imprint. The Melly team has noted that the fact that the building “was a former school made an impact, reminding us of the role cultural institutions must play as learning environments.”
By the late 1980s, the school at Witte de Withstraat 50 was winding down, just as Rotterdam’s cultural planners were seeking a location for a new contemporary art center. In 1990, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Kunstinstituut Melly) was founded and made its home on the top floors of this building. At the time, the ground and first floors were still occupied by a technical school. Early exhibitions took place on the upper two floors, while classes continued below. This unusual arrangement lasted a few years until the school fully relocated, after which Melly gradually expanded to occupy the entire premises, eventually sharing the ground floor with partner institution, TENT (until 2024).
Once the art institute was given the whole building, it adapted the interiors for public galleries and events while preserving the building’s historic character. Today, Witte de Withstraat 50 is a four-story facility with multiple galleries: two upper floors dedicated to exhibitions, and a ground-floor space known simply as “Melly”, a hybrid gallery, bookshop, and cafe/cantina. This ground floor was reimagined in 2018 from a traditional white-cube gallery into this welcoming, multi-use community space. The very name “Melly” comes from the iconic artwork Melly Shum Hates Her Job by Ken Lum, a billboard-sized piece that has been installed on the building’s façade (facing Boomgaardsstraat) since the institution’s founding in 1990. Over the years, this artwork, depicting a young woman named Melly, became a beloved symbol of the center and its connection to the city.
Despite updates to its interior and program, the building at Witte de Withstraat 50 retains an air of its historical roots. It stands as a designated monument to Rotterdam’s late-19th-century architecture (the façade has been carefully preserved). It’s also a living piece of urban history that has adapted to serve the evolving cultural needs of the city. And as of 2024, the building’s tradition of shared use continues: Hiphophuis, a hip-hop cultural center, has recently moved in, joining Kunstinstituut Melly and carrying forward the spirit of an inclusive, multi-disciplinary house of culture. Witte de Withstraat 50’s journey from a 19th-century girls’ school to a collective cultural hub mirrors the broader transformations of the street and Rotterdam itself.
The story of Witte de Withstraat, Melly, and WORM illustrates that cultural impact is a two-way street. On one hand, creative institutions can revitalize and redefine an urban area, breathing life into old buildings, attracting communities, and sparking dialogue that resonates beyond their walls. On the other hand, the surrounding environment profoundly shapes those institutions’ evolution. From the echoes of history (a garden, a school, a printing press) to the voices of contemporary society, the street has continually informed what Melly and WORM do and how they do it.
As we embark on a joint impact research initiative, this shared history reminds us that measuring impact isn’t just about numbers and outcomes, but also about understanding relationships between an institution and its locale, between neighbors in a cultural ecosystem, and between the past and future. In the case of Melly and WORM, our shared impact is rooted in this rich interplay of place and purpose, collaboration and community. It sets a strong context for our ongoing exploration of how cultural institutions make a difference, and how we can continue to grow that difference together.