The Euro Zone's Bridges from Nowhere

In the early ’90s, officials of the newly created European Monetary Institute, the predecessor to the European Central Bank, met to discuss what their new currency, the euro, would look like. They agreed that no one country’s iconography should appear on the bills, since there were to be seven denominations—from €5 up to €500—and at least 12 member states. In the interest of fairness, the officials settled on generic monuments to adorn the paper money. The structures would be nowhere in Europe, specifically, but could be anywhere, theoretically. Now, as the currency celebrates its 10th anniversary with understandably little fanfare, and the monetary union appears closer than ever to disbanding, critics in Europe still question the wisdom of those initial design parameters and wonder whether they were symptomatic of a deeper fallacy. But they can no longer say that the designs don’t correspond to reality.

A decade and a half later, in the fall of 2009, Robin Stam was waiting to pay for his dinner at Angelo Betti, a busy pizzeria close to his house in Rotterdam. Sitting at his table, he noticed for the first time the series of small bridges that appeared on the back of his euro notes. A young graphic designer with a jagged mop of brown hair, Stam began to research how the drawings ended up on the back of the euro. The bridges were designed by Robert Kalina, an employee of the National Bank of Austria in the mid-’90s, as a tribute to European engineering. When Stam, who has a rebellious streak, learned that the structures didn’t exist, he decided to change that. He would build the bridges for the first time in his hometown, the humdrum Rotterdam suburb of Spijkenisse. “They chose bridges on the euro notes to symbolize communication between the countries,” Stam explained in December, sitting in studio space he rents with two friends in Hoogvliet, another suburb on the edge of Rotterdam. “Well, that didn’t work out.”