History

Hendrik Petrus Berlage was born in Amsterdam in 1856 and trained at the Zurich Polytechnic under Gottfried Semper — an experience that instilled the belief that architecture must express its structure honestly. His Beurs van Berlage (1896–1903), commissioned as the city’s commodities exchange, made that belief monumental: a long brick volume whose round arches, frieze panels and tower are entirely integrated with the load-bearing structure, without the applied Renaissance or Gothic historicism that dominated Dutch civic architecture until then. Le Corbusier, who visited in 1911, named it the origin point of modern European architecture.

Berlage’s rationalism found an unexpected successor in the Amsterdam School of the 1910s–1920s. Michel de Klerk, working for the Eigen Haard housing corporation, designed the Het Schip block (1917–1921) in the Spaarndammerbuurt as a monument to the social democratic programme: its undulating brick facades, corner tower, post office and workers’ meeting hall were conceived as a total artwork serving the working class rather than the bourgeoisie. The Tuschinski Theatre (1921), built by a Jewish-Polish cinema entrepreneur with designs by several architects in a Hollywood-Expressionist hybrid, completed the Amsterdam visual palette: a six-storey facade of stained glass, mosaics and sculpted stone that remains the most extraordinary cinema exterior in Europe.