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(1595–1657), who brought overseas influences to his work. He is best known for building Amsterdam’s new town hall in 1665, now the Royal Palace – a more restrained building than its predecessors, exhibiting the Palladian proportions that the architect had absorbed in Italy. Van Campen’s contemporary, Philip Vingboons (1607–78), was responsible for a number of the private houses on the by now burgeoning city extension, many of them sporting the fashionable neck-gable – a slimmed-down version of the step-gable; some appealing examples can be seen at Herengracht 168 and the Cromhouthuizen at Herengracht 364–370.

The Royal Palace (Koninklijk Paleis)

Architecture in Amsterdam |

The nineteenth century

The eighteenth century was relatively uneventful, but in the nineteenth century the city developed a distinctive new style, partially spearheaded by Petrus J.H. Cuypers (1827–1921), famed for his neo-Gothic creations. Cuypers not only built the monumental Centraal Station, but also contributed a series of buildings in the outskirts – not least the Rijksmuseum, which was purpose-built as the country’s national museum, and shouts from its gabled rooftops the importance of tradition and the legacy of Dutch art.

The Rijksmuseum

The turn of the century ushered in further changes with the international, modern style of Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934), exemplified in his Beurs on the Damrak, exhibiting the attributes of a restrained yet highly decorative vision. Berlage’s work inspired the Amsterdam School, a group of architects working in the city in the early twentieth century, led by Piet Kramer (1881–1961) and Michael de Klerk (1884–1923). The movement’s keynote building was de Klerk’s Het Schip housing complex of 1920, on the western edge of the centre.

Eastern docklands architecture

The Muziekgebouw

Architecture in Amsterdam | The nineteenth century |

Contemporary Amsterdam

Modern Amsterdam is changing fast, with new developments constantly adding to the city’s architectural variety. The largest, perhaps most influential of these are the docklands schemes to the west and east of the city centre, where some of the city’s long-neglected waterways are being transformed into a modern-day version of the seventeenth-century master plan. The docklands to the east, and Zeeburg in particular, are home to some of the city’s most exciting new architecture – a mixture of renovated warehouses and assertive new structures, the most notable being the avant-garde Muziekgebouw. There are also some clever, contemporary takes on the traditional Dutch waterfront on Java Island, whose modern terraces and curvy bridges evoke the canal houses of the city centre – and as such bring the city’s architectural story full circle.

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Acknowledgements

A Rough Guide to Rough Guides

Published in 1982, the first Rough Guide – to Greece – was a student scheme that became a publishing phenomenon. Mark Ellingham, a recent graduate in English from Bristol University, had been travelling in Greece the previous summer and couldn’t find the right guidebook. With a small group of friends he wrote his own guide, combining a highly contemporary, journalistic style with a thoroughly practical approach to travellers’ needs.

The immediate success of the book spawned a series that rapidly covered dozens of destinations. And, in addition to impecunious backpackers, Rough Guides soon acquired a much broader and older readership that relished the guides’ wit and inquisitiveness as much as their enthusiastic, critical approach and value-for-money ethos.

These days, Rough Guides include recommendations from shoestring to luxury and cover more than 200 destinations around the globe, including almost every country in the Americas and Europe, more than half of Africa and most of Asia and Australasia. Our ever-growing team of authors and photographers is spread all over the world, particularly in Europe, the US and Australia.

In the early 1990s, Rough Guides branched