Jacobus Baars’ Synagoge Oost, Linnaeus Street

There were few places where architecture’s competing forms of modernism overlapped more than the Netherlands in the 1920s. Traditionalists like Kropholler, De Stijl’s Oud, Rationalists like van der Vlugt and Duiker, and the versatile Dudok built alongside the work of the capital’s eponymous ‘Amsterdam school’ style.

The influence of the great Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers — Holland’s Pugin — might be inferred as the progenitors of the Amsterdam school (De Klerk, van der Mey, and Kramer) all studied or worked in the firm of Cuypers’ nephew Eduard.

The Dutch capital’s take on the brick expressionism originated among its Hanseatic neighbours but was sufficiently distinct to merit its own name. Architect Jacobus Baars (1886-1956) deployed the style to great effect in the work he did for Amsterdam’s then-flourishing Jewish community.

Baars designed the 1928 Synagoge Oost (East Synagogue) on Linnaeusstraat (Linnaeus Street) in the Transvaalbuurt neighbourhood that was developed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Dutch sympathies in the then-still-recent Anglo-Boer War are obvious from the naming of local streets and squares (and, indeed, the district) after Afrikaner places, battles, and statesmen.

The architect placed the building at an angle so that the entrance could face on to Linnaeusstraat while the holy ark containing the Torah scrolls faced Jerusalem, skilfully filling in the rest of the site with clergy and school structures ancillary to the sanctuary and congregation. (more…)

Catholic Amsterdam Proclaims a Year of Saint Nicholas

A TINY RELIC of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker has provided an excuse for Amsterdam Catholics to organise a whole year of festivities dedicated to the holy man and his legacy. The Basilica of St Nicholas stands just across from Centraal Station, gateway to the Dutch capital for so many visitors, and the parish has received as a gift the relic from the Benedictine abbey of St Adalbert’s in Egmond.

The tiny sliver of St Nicholas’s rib was enshrined in the Basilica at a special Mass opening the Nicolaasjaar on the eve of the saint’s feast in December. Bishop Jan van Burgsteden presided and prayers were also offered for HKH Princess Catharina-Amalia whose eighteenth birthday fell days later on 7 December.

The opening of the year met with wide coverage in the media, with even the website of the city proclaiming “There will always be a bit of Sinterklaas in Amsterdam from now on”.

“Saint Nicholas is really coming to Amsterdam now,” deacon Rob Polet told the evening news on Dutch television, “and here he will stay”.

“From the Friesch Dagblad to the Nederlands Dagblad, from Trouw to De Telegraaf: hardly any newspaper wanted to miss it,” the parish reports. “De Stentor, the Eindhovens Dagblad, the Zeeuwse PZC, and many other titles spread the news of St Nicholas. NRC Handelsblad and Het Parool even used it twice.”

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The ‘House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford’ — more commonly called Merton College — is one of the smaller colleges in Oxford, located right next door to lovely little Corpus.

Aside from rendering the architecture well, townscapes from the eighteenth century often give delightful little hints of city life. Michael Rooker (1746–1801) painted this scene of Merton College from its eponymous street in 1771, and the view today is hardly changed at all.

One of my favourite cityscapes is Canaletto’s view of the back end of Downing Street looking towards the old Horse Guards which you can pop into the Tate and see thanks to the generosity of Lord Lloyd-Webber. Incidentally, both scenes depict carpets being hung out for beating.

If you love the capital of the Netherlandosphere I recommended adding to your library Kijk Amsterdam 1700-1800: De mooiste stadsgezichten (‘See Amsterdam 1700-1800: The Most Beautiful Cityscapes’), the well-produced catalogue of the 2017 exhibition of the same name at the Amsterdam City Archives which includes 300 illustrations in full colour.

It’s high time the Museum of Oxford or the Ashmolean — or anyone really — put together a similar exhibition of Oxford cityscapes from the same century.

Incidentally, it was in Merton Field as a teenager that I played my first game of cricket. Who would have guessed then that eighteen years later your humble and obedient scribe would be facing the Vatican on the field of battle in the same sport? (We lost.)

Amsterdam is known for its canals, not its public squares, but Het Spui is quite welcoming all the same. The name means roughly sluice or floodgate, pointing to the unsurprisingly watery origins of the place.

At first, it was a canal like any other and was only filled in during the nineteenth century: The first part in 1867 when the neighbouring Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal was filled in, the rest in 1882, two years before the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal.

The Spui (pronounced “spouw” — unless Dawie van die bliksem corrects me) is a focal point surrounded by a number of sights. There’s the Old Lutheran Church, where the Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen met in its early years and still a working congregation today.

There’s the Maagdenhuis, built as a Catholic orphanage and also the seat of the Archpriest of Holland and Zeeland until the restoration of the hierarchy in 1856. The orphanage moved out in 1957 when the building became a bank branch but was purchased by the University of Amsterdam in 1962 to house the administration of the growing institution. (more…)

A friend sent this link to a property for sale in Amsterdam. I can easily imagine getting a lot of writing done while listening to LPs of baroque music (my latest craze) through a haze of cigarette smoke in a garret like this.

Its drawback is that it’s on an actual street — what’s the point of living in Amsterdam if you’re not on an actual canal?

— It was once thought that when a key doctrine is abandoned or modified there is no turning back. But, writes Richard J Mouw at First Things, the turning-away from theological liberalism at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit should make us think again.

— Christopher Akers at Quadrapheme argues Dostoevsky is right that beauty will save the world.

— Norfolk MP and former Guards officer Adam Holloway spent his teenage gap year fighting with the Afghan resistance against the Soviets.

An eccentric undergraduate in Edinburgh I knew exhibited a rare progressivism when she argued that in Afghanistan, the West should’ve backed the Soviets and backed them hard. I’m not convinced.

— “The overwhelming aesthetic is glam,” writes Nasri Atallah in his insider’s guide to Beirut for the Guardian. “People even dress up to go to the grocery store.”

— Underreported: Prince Charles has made a personal donation of £2,000 to St Patrick’s Church, the Catholic parish in Belfast targeted by Protestant Loyalist marchers.

I attended Orthodox Divine Liturgy yesterday at the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, about a 20-minute walk from Central Station. The liturgy was mostly in Dutch. The church is a former Franciscan priory church. A parishioner, a Dutch convert, told me that in Holland you are either a Protestant Calvinist, a Catholic Calvinist, or an atheist Calvinist. He was pretty sure that most of the (tiny) Orthodox minority were Calvinists, too.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam building will, from June, be home to collections from St. Petersburg’s Imperial Hermitage Museum

A new 100,000-square-foot space displaying works from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg will open in Amsterdam this June. The Hermitage Amsterdam will be located in the Amstelhof, a former home for the elderly built in 1683 by the Dutch Reformed Church and transformed into a modern exhibition space by Hans van Heeswijk Architects. The opening exhibition, “At the Russian Court” — a “a deeply researched exploration of the opulent material culture, elaborate social hierarchy and richly layered traditions of the Tsarist court at its height in the nineteenth century” — will display 1,800 works from the massive collection in St. Petersburg and continue until the end of January 2010.

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ONE OF MY FAVORITE handsome and dignified, and yet relatively small, buildings is the Felix Meritis on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. It has a long and interesting history to accompany the beauty of its design. The ‘Felix Meritis’ was a learned society founded by a number of prominent burghers of Amsterdam in 1777 for the promotion of the arts and sciences in their city. Its name is Latin for ‘fortunate (or more literally, ‘happy’) by merit’. Ten years later, the Felix Meritis purchased four narrow homes on the Keizersgracht and constructed a building, designed by the architect Jacob Otten Husly, on the site. (more…)

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