Rotterdam's Bijenkorf department store opens in 1930, designed by Willem Marinus Dudok and billed at the time as the biggest and most modern store in Europe. Dutch journalist Peter Veenendaal traces its short life: the crowds who came to see the building itself, the reputation it built as a showcase of modern architecture, and the German bombardment of May 1940 that leaves it largely in ruins just ten years after it opened. What survives limps along until the mid-1950s, when the remaining structure is closed and demolished, leaving almost nothing behind. Veenendaal rebuilds the store from what does remain, archival footage, photographs, and eyewitness accounts from people who remember walking its floors or watching it burn. The film stays close to this one building rather than the wider city, using it as a case study in how quickly a landmark can be built up as a symbol and then erased, first by war and then by the ordinary decision to tear down what war left standing.