Architect, the Netherlands Michel de Klerk, in collaboration with his colleagues and in his own brief, but prolific, practice, was the creative inspiration for the Amsterdam School, a name first given to a group of young architects advocating an Expressive modernism in the years around 1915. Unlike other early Modern movements, the Amsterdam School was not an organized movement. It had no manifesto, journal, or official spokesperson. Although de Klerk wrote almost nothing, he was widely recognized as the leader of the movement through the aesthetic and visionary examples of his competition entries, built projects, graphic design, and furniture design. During a brief period, corresponding to the years of his independent practice from 1911 until his death in 1923, the Amsterdam School radically changed the city’s urban landscape. These architects, including de Klerk, J.M.van der May, Piet Kramer, and others, contributed an architecture that expressed the personal aesthetic visions of th...