Plans to relocate the Escher Museum in The Hague to the former US embassy building on Lange Voorhout have come unstuck, now the new city administration plans to sell the building to the private sector.

‘We realise that this is a blow to the cultural sector, but running this building as a museum will be loss-making and that would mean making cuts elsewhere in the budget,’ culture alderman Robert van Asten told the Volkskrant. ‘This is why we have opted to sell the building.’

Van Asten said he hoped the buyer would find a cultural or public sector function for the building, but added, ‘we could use a hotel’, the paper said.

The former embassy building, which has been empty since the US embassy moved to a new, more secure location in Wassenaar last year, was designed by Hungarian American architect Marcel Breuer and is a listed building. It was built between 1956 and 1959.