Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [203]
NDSM Shipyard
Take a ferry from behind Centraal Station to Amsterdam Noord, where the buildings and slipways of the NDSM Shipyard have been resurrected as exhibition space and artists’ studios, fast becoming some of the city’s most happening cultural hangouts, and also firmly rooted in the city’s maritime past. See "Amsterdam Noord".
Wildlife on the canal
Amsterdam on the water | NDSM Shipyard |
What’s in the water?
The one activity that really isn’t recommended in Amsterdam’s canals is swimming. People do end up in the drink from time to time, after which they are fished out and sent straight to hospital for a stomach pump and tetanus shot. Having said that, the water is in fact much cleaner than it used to be, and the canals are no longer channels for the city’s raw sewage, although they are full of rubbish – car wrecks, old bikes, you name it. There is even a reasonable level of marine life down in the depths – indigenous fish such as carp and pike, as well as more recent arrivals like Chinese mitten crabs and corbicula clams, said to favour the car wrecks on the bottom.
Architecture in Amsterdam
Amsterdam has one of the best-preserved city centres in the world, free of the high-rises and cluttered, modern development that characterize so many other European capitals. Despite that, it is not a monumental city – there are no triumphal thoroughfares and few memorable palaces and churches. This was not a royal or an aristocratic city but a merchant one, with a tolerant attitude to religion, and the character of the architecture reflects this; it is Amsterdam’s private, low-key dwellings, rather than its grand monuments, that give the city its distinctive charm.
Architecture in Amsterdam |
Beginnings
Amsterdam was a great site for a trading city, bang on the confluence of two rivers. But in other respects it was a terrible choice – like many Dutch towns, a flat and waterlogged plain, in which buildings needed to be supported by thousands of wooden piles bashed into the sandy soil. Just across from Centraal Station, the wooden house at Zeedijk 1 – now home to the In ’t Aepjen bar – is one of very few timber buildings still left, dating back to around 1550, while not far from here, one of Amsterdam’s oldest surviving buildings is the Oude Kerk, dating from the 1300s. Deeper into the city centre, the Houten Huys in the Begijnhof dates from 1477, and still boasts its original Gothic timber frontage.
The Begijnhof
Architecture in Amsterdam |
The Golden Age
Brick became the building material of choice from the late sixteenth century onwards, and buildings began to acquire the distinctive gables that adorn houses all over the city. The earliest type was the step-gable; the house at Oudezijds Voorburgwal 14 is a good example of this early Renaissance style, with its stone embellishments on red brick. The gable soon developed – most notably under the greatest Dutch architect of the period, Hendrick de Keyser (1565–1621) – into a more distinctively “Amsterdam” form, in which the previously plain step-gables were decorated with stonework and sculpture. One of the most lavish examples is the double-step-gabled residence at Singel 140–142 – where Captain Banning Cocq (the principal figure in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch) lived – built in 1600 by de Keyser.
Herengracht
The seventeenth century saw a surge in the city’s population, and a major expansion was required to successfully absorb its newcomers. This exercise in city planning was way ahead of its time, using the expansion to create the graceful sweep of canals you see today. It was also the heyday of Dutch architecture, and Hendrick de Keyser, and others, left their mark with a series of trailblazing works, such as the Huis Bartolotti at Herengracht 170–172, with its ornate step-gables, as well as two of the city’s most characteristic seventeenth-century churches: the Westerkerk and the Zuiderkerk.
Huis Bartolotti
De Keyser’s distinctive Westerkerk tower was finished by his successor as the leading city architect, Jacob van Campen