History

At the turn of the twentieth century, Amsterdam faced a severe housing crisis. The Housing Act of 1901 empowered housing associations to finance construction with public guarantees, and the borough of Amsterdam-West became the testing ground for a new approach to workers’ housing — one that refused to treat cheapness as a design virtue. The Eigen Haard housing corporation commissioned Michel de Klerk to design three successive building blocks in the Spaarndammerbuurt. The first two, on Spaarndammerplantsoen and Hembrugstraat, were completed between 1913 and 1917. They already showed De Klerk’s characteristic compression of ornament into every surface: stepped gables, ceramic tiles, iron railings shaped like flowering stems.

The third block, built between 1919 and 1921 on Oostzaanstraat, was the culmination. De Klerk treated the triangular plot as a compositional challenge, pushing the corner into a tapered turret that rises above the roofline in tiers of curved brick. The post office he incorporated into the ground floor of the block became one of the most photographed interiors of the movement: its ribbed vaulting, stained-glass clerestory and tile-work counter survive almost intact. De Klerk did not live to see the wider impact of his work; he died in 1923, aged thirty-nine, of meningitis.

The building’s 102 apartments were occupied by working-class families throughout the twentieth century. By the 1980s the fabric had deteriorated, and a lengthy restoration programme brought the complex back to its original condition. The Stichting Museum Het Schip was founded in 1995 and the museum opened in the recovered school and post office in 2001, reconstructing a 1920s workers’ flat to give visitors a direct sense of how the apartments were originally furnished and used.