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Category Archives: Amsterdam

The Amsterdam School: a new model for living

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Amsterdam, Guest Post, Housing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

1920s

Municipal Dreams is back on its travels with this follow-up post by Ben Austwick to his account of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam published last week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/

In the previous post, I looked at the Amsterdam School’s early work in the north of the city where Michel de Klerk laid a radical blueprint for a new kind of working-class housing at Het Schip, an experimental building that emphasised the communal and worked to socialist ideals. Here I will look at Plan Zuid, town planner Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s rebuilding of south Amsterdam from 1917 where the Amsterdam School’s philosophy was writ large in a grand slum clearance project.

A bird's-eye view of the new Plan Zuid as envisaged by Berlage © Wikimedia Commons

A bird’s eye view of the new Plan Zuid as drawn by Berlage

Plan Zuid levelled south Amsterdam to be rebuilt on Berlage’s principles. Avenues are bordered by estates of Amsterdam School social housing. Parks, squares and shops punctuate every street. The city’s mid-rise density is maintained, as is a sense of space that echoes the old canal ring. The broad Amstelkanaal cuts through from east to west, crossed with bridges built by the Amsterdam School.

They are flanked by sculptures by Hildo Krop, which chillingly show a late Expressionist style that would later be adopted by Nazi Germany. This is unfair, as Krop took pains to represent his city’s status as an international port with figures representing the Negro, the Chinaman and the Eskimo – dated now, but progressive at the time.

Hildo Krop (a)

© Ben Austwick

Individual estates in Plan Zuid take up only a few blocks, not a result of Berlage’s planning but, more interestingly, socialist alderman FM Wibaut’s desire to involve local housing cooperatives. Cooperatives were subsidised through the housing act, and fitted the socialist environment of the time. Throughout the area, the names of cooperatives are carved in stone above apartment block doorways.

The most famous of these was built by the De Degaraad (‘Daybreak’) cooperative, which commissioned Piet Kramer and Michel de Klerk to build a daring development of 294 homes. There is a mature coherency to the estate missing from de Klerk’s earlier, wilder Het Schip.

De Degaraad: the 'Butter Churn'

De Degaraad – the ‘Butter Churn’ © Ben Austwick

The tight, honey-coloured brickwork is sculpted in curves, steps and towers, a whirl of abstract forms. Expressionism’s propensity for the twee is shown in parts of the project’s echoing of the traditional Dutch farmhouse, and its highest point is inspired by a butter churn; but a more generous view is that the architects were providing a link to the residents’ heritage, working people new to urban living who were less than a generation away from the farms of rural Holland.

A JC Van Epen scheme

A JC Van Epen scheme © Ben Austwick

Less radical, but similarly accomplished cooperative-built developments make up the rest of Plan Zuid. The eccentric Dutch architect JC Van Epen, who drew mile-high skyscrapers containing entire working class districts, designed the decidedly more modest blocks of Reijnier Vinkeleskade, which nonetheless boldly state an intention of quality with their beautiful laddered windows and Hildo Krop gargoyles.

Hildo Krop gargoyles on a JC Van Epen building

Hildo Krop gargoyles on a JC Van Epen building © Ben Austwick

On Cornelis van der Lindenstraat, flats built by JC van Epen and MJE Lippets display a stone frieze celebrating the founder of the first Amsterdam housing cooperative, Harke Keegstra.

© Ben Austwick

Looking up above a busy row of shops by the Amstelkanaal, a block by GJ Rutgers has a similar rounded form to De Degaraad, with circular balconies on corner flats offering three-quarter views.

Flats by GJ Rutgers

Flats by GJ Rutgers © Ben Austwick

Further west, a single, isolated block built towards the end of the Amsterdam School period foreshadows what was to come. FA Warner’s austere, concrete apartment building on Woningbouw Hacquarstraat has the familiar dimensions of the Amsterdam School but leaves its Expressionist style behind for something more simple.

FA Warners 2

Flats designed by FA Warners © Ben Austwick

Black and white tiling and painted wooden struts are the only nod to decoration in a building that celebrates its dun-brown concrete facing and angular form. It is obviously an experimental design, the concrete roughly applied to a building that doesn’t quite seem comfortable with it. It could be called ugly, but the harshness of the block is offset by lush planting on the generous balconies, the grey-brown concrete emerging like a crag in a forest. A proud old lady came out of her flat to tell me about the building as I was taking photos, and it is obviously loved by its residents.

Flats by FA Warners

© Ben Austwick

The building highlights the criticism the Amsterdam School suffered toward the end of its period, and the change in style that was to supersede it. The architects of the burgeoning De Stijl movement saw the Amsterdam School as twee and retrogressive, ‘which by sticking gables together, causing statues and rods and stones to protrude, tries to achieve an expressive apparent charm’ while they wanted an architecture that was ‘purely plastic’, in tune with the new international style of modernism. FA Warners’ block is a perhaps clumsy attempt to bridge the expressionist Amsterdam School and De Stijl’s modernist dynamism.

800px-Rietveld_Schröderhuis_HayKranen-7

Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht: a de Stijl private home built in 1924

A year after the building was completed in 1924, the changing political climate meant funding for Amsterdam’s extensive slum clearance programme came to an end. The atmosphere of progressive social change was replaced with a conservatism that saw De Stijl construct private housing for the free market.

This more famous movement is seen as one of the harbingers of modernism but I would argue that its social conservatism was actually a step back, its pure lines and futuristic plasticity an aesthetic flourish on an old-fashioned idea of what housing should be.

Criticisms of the Amsterdam School’s social housing are similar to criticisms of the British arts and crafts movement – there is decoration and whimsy rather than solid practicality; it harks back to a non-existent rural idyll rather than embrace the future; it uses traditional materials rather than new methods of construction. These are fair criticisms when applied to the arts and crafts movement but ignore the scale and social dynamism of the Amsterdam School’s work.

Communal blocks of this scale were unheard of, and the incorporation of a school and post office at Het Schip, and a library at De Degaraad, show they were not just conceived as housing, but as a place where the poor could build a better life. The socialist ideals of the architects ran deeper – the decoration so readily dismissed by De Stijl was in part a practical project to give work to unemployed craftsmen and stonemasons.

De Degaraad

De Degaraad © Ben Austwick

These self-contained estates, funded by the city but commissioned by local residents’ cooperatives, working in tandem with architects who shared their socialist ideals, are a rare success story in the history of social housing. The high quality of the buildings, coupled with Berlage’s town planning and the city’s continued use of them as social housing, make Amsterdam’s working-class inner city a safe and pleasant place to live.

In Britain, the birthplace of social housing, buildings of this era still followed traditional ideas of the private unit: cottage estates in the suburbs, or blocks of deck-access tenements in the cities, with a front door for everyone. Histories of social housing tend to jump from this to the concrete estates of the post-war period, missing out a crucial intermediate period where the communal ideal was forged.

Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna, built 1927-1930 © Wikimedia Commons

Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna, built 1927-1930 © Wikimedia Commons

The Amsterdam School’s work went on to directly influence one of the most important experiments in social housing, Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna. This vast development, the first large scale high-rise estate of the twentieth century, is in obvious debt to the school: in its arched entrances, decorative towers and expressionist forms and, more importantly, its communal laundries, kindergartens, playgrounds, library and health centre. In 1934, the Leeds city architect RAH Livett visited Karl Marx-Hof and a few years later built Quarry Hill Flats, the largest social housing estate in Europe, along similar lines of construction and layout, and with the same built-in social amenities.

Quarry Hill, Leeds, built 1934-1938 © Leeds Library and Information Service

Quarry Hill, Leeds, built 1934-1938 © Leeds Library and Information Service

Quarry Hill looms large in my imagination, in distant childhood memories of a crumbling concrete castle behind Leeds market, and in 1989, Peter Mitchell’s photography exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery, which sparked my interest in social housing. As I walked around Amsterdam’s inner suburbs, the arched entrances, rounded corners and laddered windows of the Amsterdam School’s work took me back to Quarry Hill and my city’s great, failed socialist experiment.

Students of Quarry Hill know it was directly influenced by the exotic Karl Marx-Hof, the mere name of which points to a more progressive time and that it in turn influenced Park Hill in Sheffield, the pinnacle of the twentieth-century social housing ideal. This lineage goes back to the daring, artistic, practical Amsterdam School, the pioneers of communal social housing, quiet in the shadow of a city whose famous liberalism, freedom and open-mindedness supported an innovation in social housing that went on to influence the world.

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The Amsterdam School: Expressionism and Experimentation

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by Municipal Dreams in Amsterdam, Guest Post, Housing

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

1920s

Municipal Dreams travels abroad for the first time this week, thanks to this fascinating account by Ben Austwick of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam.  A follow-up post will appear next week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/

The Amsterdam School is a little celebrated offshoot of German Expressionist architecture, active for a short period between 1910 and 1925 but nevertheless defining large areas of the city’s inner suburbs. While its municipal buildings offer little in the way of innovation, the period coincided with an extraordinary boom in early social housing and its communal ideals laid blueprints for the modernist estates of the twentieth century.

Het Schip

Het Schip © Ben Austwick

Expressionist architecture followed the romantic ideals of the neo-Gothic and even the neo-Medieval, merged with the new shapes and forms of the modern movement. The most famous examples are probably Gaudi’s Barcelona Cathedral and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam. These buildings offer no break from past ideas of what buildings are and what they are for, merely rebuilding in a modern style with modern construction techniques.

Het Schip exterior

© Ben Austwick

The Amsterdam School’s social housing experiments broke from this significantly, with a philosophy that predates Corbusier’s ‘machines for living’ – they were communal, community-run and self-contained.

Michel de Klerk (1884-1923)

Michel de Klerk (1884-1923)

The first significant piece of social housing the Amsterdam School built was Michel de Klerk’s Het Schip in 1917, a housing block north of Amsterdam’s canal ring in the working class shipping district of   Spaarndammerbuurt. This radical building is decorative, its details and aspects reminiscent of a ship, albeit broken up by courtyards, turrets and gables.

Later art deco buildings would take a much sleeker influence from the ocean liner, and Het Schip lacks the coherence of form that would come to define 1920s modernism. Its mixture of function and experimentation, and the resulting surprising changes in vista, echo the organic brutalism of Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre and Owen Luder’s Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth some fifty years later.

Het Schip exterior 2

© Ben Austwick

Built to be self-contained and all encompassing, a mixture of various sizes of dwelling and the inclusion of a school and post office mean imposing, featureless walls give way to spires and courtyards, ziggurats and terraces to cottage gardens and drinking fountains. At first the building is impressively daunting, second rather ugly, but finally enchanting as you explore further. Decorative details by the Amsterdam School’s ‘architectural sculptor’ Hildo Krop underline the desire to make a statement of quality and progression.

Hildo Krop gargoyle at Het Schip

Hildo Krop gargoyle at Het Schip © Ben Austwick

Het Schip marks a significant break in attitudes to housing the poor. With the influence of the British arts and crafts movement dwellings were built to the highest specification, but in a more communal style. The inclusion of a school and post office – which contained one of Amsterdam’s first telephones – at a time when working-class literacy rates were still low – shows socialist ideals of self-improvement.

The post office

The post office © Janericloebe and made available on Wikimedia Commons

The ship design is a reflection of the buildings’ tenants’ employment in the nearby docks, and so becomes part of a coherent ideal rather than pointless whimsy. This is enforced at the back of the building, where a courtyard faces an older social housing development built by the Protestant movement. While Het Schip’s design harmonises with its neighbour’s courtyard to form a continuous space, a decorative tower was built to rudely display a red rooster – a symbol of socialism – to antagonise its religious neighbour. This was a step too far and was soon taken down.

Het Schip 2(a)

© Ben Austwick

This aggressive socialism brings Het Schip into focus. Adrift in industrial north Amsterdam, it was a rude and confrontational building, heralding a new era for the city. The Amsterdam School’s architects had been tasked with housing the city’s poor after a 1901 legal ruling that obliged the Netherlands to clear its older, substandard working-class housing. The ruling laid down technical, spatial and hygienic guidelines but crucially left more detailed building regulations to municipal authorities.

Civic pride, and perhaps more importantly competition for funds, meant a high quality threshold for Amsterdam’s slum clearance housing. The appointment of Amsterdam’s first social democratic alderman, FM Wibaut, in 1914, sealed the Amsterdam School architects’ dominance of this new era – as socialists themselves, they appealed to his vision for the city.

A re-creation of a 1930s Het Schip interior

A re-creation of a Het Schip interior from the on-site museum © Ben Austwick

The extent of this project is obvious in the area outside the central canal ring – quite abruptly, Amsterdam’s inner suburbs are dominated by their work. It is unusual for a city to have such a concentration of high-quality housing by a single architectural school, a reflection of the zeal with which this progressive city attacked its slum clearance problem. Later, more modest Amsterdam School architecture makes up the rest of Spaarndammerbuurt, which as elsewhere in the city is still largely used as social housing. The area is one of Amsterdam’s more multicultural and, while poor, shows a sense of community engendered by planning that sees shops, parks and playgrounds overlooked on all sides by close-quartered residential blocks.

220px-Berlage

Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934)

Such a large slum clearance project needed an overview and it was the municipal authority’s town planner Hendrik Petrus Berlage who provided it. More technocratic than the Amsterdam School’s self-styled ‘artistic architects’, Berlage took a rationalist approach, drawing up precisely worked street plans with closely controlled distances between parks, shops, amenities and dwellings. There was some friction between him and the architects but it is as much his town planning as their buildings that led to the success of these urban areas. Crucially, both had free rein in their respective roles.

South of Amsterdam’s canal ring lies the working-class district of De Pijp. Street markets cling on in an area that is rapidly gentrifying, following a pattern that has already seen the famous working-class district of the Jordaan taken over by the upwardly mobile of the city. Walking south of Prinsengracht, the outermost canal of the central ring, within a few streets the nineteenth-century apartment blocks of De Pijp subtly give way to Berlage’s greatest project, Plan Zuid. In the next post, I will show how the rebuilding of south Amsterdam took the experimentation of Het Schip and applied it to a revolutionary town planning project.

Notes

This Tumblr post provides some images to enable you to follow up some of the architectural and building references in Ben’s article.

Museum Het Schip has an English-language website.

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