AMSTERDAM SCHOOL

The Amsterdam School was comprised of Dutch architects active between 1910 and 1930
whose work was associated with Expressionism and promulgated by the publication Wendingen.
During World War I and for a decade thereafter, the striking and controversial work of
the Amsterdam School transformed entire portions of its eponymous city and influenced
architecture throughout the Netherlands. Although almost every building type was
addressed, the major monuments are governmentfunded ensembles of workers’ dwellings
arranged in perimeter blocks that brought a new scale to Dutch cities. Paradoxically,
although its members sought unique solutions for each commission, a readily identifiable
group style emerged, and collaborations were frequent. Characterized by a luxurious
fantasy and individualistic details, the work came under fire in the later 1920s from
proponents of the functionalist Nieuwe Bouwen; subsequently, the Amsterdam School was written out of
the literature. But in the 1970s, reevaluation commenced; many of the buildings have
been restored and once again are a magnet for architects and urbanists.
The cradle of the Amsterdam School was the atelier of Eduard Cuypers (1859–1927).
Working there at various times during the first decade were its future leader, Michel de
Klerk (1884–1923) and such important representatives as Johann Melchior van der Mey
(1878–1949) and Pieter Lodewjik Kramer (1881–1961). Other future acolytes in that
office who absorbed Cuypers’s credo that architecture was first and foremost an art that
must transcend, while serving the pragmatic realities of program and resources, included
G.F.LaCroix (1877–1923), Nicolaas Landsdorp (1885–1968), B.T.Boeyinga (1886–
1969), Jan Boterenbrood (1886–1932), J.M.Luthmann (1890–1973), and Dick Greiner
(1891–1964).
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Cuyper’s peculiar synthesis of Austrian and German Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), British
Arts and Crafts, Belgian Art Nouveau, 17th-century Dutch architecture, and Indonesian
art appears in more abstract guise in all of their work. Better known architects of
Cuypers’s generation such as Willem Kromhout (1864–1940) and K.P.C.de Bazel (1869–
1923) also were admired exemplars but with the doyen of Dutch architecture,
H.P.Berlage (1856–1934), they had a more complicated relationship. In his one published
statement of 1916, de Klerk criticized Berlage’s work for its excessive sobriety and lack
of representational character in both materials and function. Yet they followed his use of
geometric systems to proportion plans and elevations, and in the late teens and early
1920s, Berlage worked with members of the Amsterdam School and responded to their
delight in piquant invention; his housing around the Mercatorplein (1925–27) indicates a
mutual regard.
Although the Amsterdam School, unlike its rival, De Stijl, embraced no specific
theoretical program, its members were united not only by stylistic practice and the
conviction that architecture was first and foremost an inclusive art that should be
aesthetically accessible to people of all classes, but also by training (many were
autodidacts or studied in courses outside the main professional school at Delft). To
understand the movement’s rapid and widespread—if short-lived—influence, it is
necessary to review several peculiarly Dutch institutions through which its “members”
exercised power. The club Architectura et Amicitia (A et A), founded in 1855, during the
teens and twenties was led by those sympathetic to the artistic ideals of the Amsterdam
School, whose work was privileged in its publications, especially Wendi ngen (literally, “Turnings,”
but in the sense of departures or deviations), which under the partisan edi-torship of
Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885–1987) appeared monthly from 1918 to 1928. The
club also held competitions and exhibitions that disseminated designs conforming to the
group’s aesthetic position; it was in a review of the display mounted by A et A in 1916
that the name Ams terdams e School first appeared in print.
Amsterdam’s municipal organizations also played a role. The Department of Public
Works was staffed by its adherents, as testified by the street furniture, bridges, public
baths, schools, and offices for city agencies that were designed and executed between
1917 and 1930. The Social Democrats responsible for housing policy in Amsterdam were
admirers, for they believed that the work of the Amsterdam School dignified the
neighborhoods of the working- and lower-middle-class families for whom they were
responsible. The Commission of Aesthetic Advice (Schoonhei ds commis s ie), which passed judgment on exterior
design, also was dominated by its advocates, much to the chagrin of architects of other
stylistic persuasions, who often had to change their designs to conform to Amsterdam
School conceptions.
Multicolored brick and tile, quintessentially Dutch materials, were employed for
structure and cladding but used in unprecedented ways, in combination with concrete,
stone, and powerful new mortars, to create unique configurations that pulsate with
vitality. The dynamism of the modern metropolis inspired many of the formal strategies
employed by the Amsterdam School, yet vernacular, historical, and even naturalistic
references, as well as motifs from German and Scandinavian architecture and Frank
Lloyd Wright, leavened the imagery. This was a narrative architecture that used massing
and ornament iconographically, to contextualize each commission. Accusations of
irrationalism and facadism were exaggerated; when commissions allowed, interior spaces
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were as ingenious as exterior envelopes and in each case expressed the realities of the
program. After 1925 socioeconomic events curtailed the extravagant conceits of the
Amsterdam School and led to a more repetitious and less imaginative vocabulary, but
during its reign in the Netherlands it was responsible for such remarkable buildings as the
Scheepvaarthuis, 1912–16 (by Van der Meij, Kramer, and de Klerk), and the housing
estates Eigen Haard, 1914–18 (de Klerk) and De Dageraad, 1919–21 (de Klerk and
Kramer), all in Amsterdam, plus the villas compromising Park Meerwijk, 1917, in
Bergen (Kramer, La Croix, plus J.F Staal [1879–1940] and Margaret StaalKropholler
[1891–1966], the Netherlands’ first female architect), the Bijenkorf Department Store in
The Hague, 1925–26, by Kramer, and the post office in Utrecht 1917–24, by Joseph
Crouwel (1885–1962).