Municipal Dreams is back on its travels with this follow-up post by Ben Austwick to his account of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam published last week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/
In the previous post, I looked at the Amsterdam School’s early work in the north of the city where Michel de Klerk laid a radical blueprint for a new kind of working-class housing at Het Schip, an experimental building that emphasised the communal and worked to socialist ideals. Here I will look at Plan Zuid, town planner Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s rebuilding of south Amsterdam from 1917 where the Amsterdam School’s philosophy was writ large in a grand slum clearance project.
A bird’s eye view of the new Plan Zuid as drawn by Berlage
Plan Zuid levelled south Amsterdam to be rebuilt on Berlage’s principles. Avenues are bordered by estates of Amsterdam School…
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Municipal Dreams travels abroad for the first time this week, thanks to this fascinating account by Ben Austwick of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam. A follow-up post will appear next week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/
The Amsterdam School is a little celebrated offshoot of German Expressionist architecture, active for a short period between 1910 and 1925 but nevertheless defining large areas of the city’s inner suburbs. While its municipal buildings offer little in the way of innovation, the period coincided with an extraordinary boom in early social housing and its communal ideals laid blueprints for the modernist estates of the twentieth century.
Het Schip © Ben Austwick
Expressionist architecture followed the romantic ideals of the neo-Gothic and even the neo-Medieval, merged with the new shapes and forms of the modern movement. The most famous examples are probably Gaudi’s Barcelona Cathedral and Mendelsohn’s Einstein…
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Last week we looked at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan. It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and – for some (for very many in the 1940s) – as a means of making a better world. That’s a language you hardly hear nowadays but maybe we should bring it back into fashion.
The language of JH Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie in the Plan was generally more measured. The tone is bureaucratic, almost technocratic and their overall approach is flagged in their first chapter, ‘Social Groupings and Major Use Zones’. They saw the city as an agglomeration of zones with varying functions which had hitherto been inadequately separated or insensitively connected.
Coloured Plate 1: Social and Functional Analysis
In particular, they identified a ‘highly organised and inter-related system of…
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We amble down the meandering drive, surrounded by mature trees and meadowlands, curious cows observing our passing, a couple of the house dogs trot out aimiably to inspect us, the birdsong is intense… the charm of Country House visiting in Ireland.
We enter the courtyard to pay our fee and it is immediately clear that this is no ordinary garden visit – the hand and eye of an artist is at work, small tableaux abound.
This is Burtown House and Gardens, the home of the late Wendy Walsh, one of Ireland’s best botanical artists, her daughter Lesley Fennell, an artist, and her son James Fennell, a highly regarded photographer; a family home, still in the hands of the family that built it in the early 18th century.
The wonderful herbaceous borders lie at the rear of the house, orchestrated yet exuberant in colour – poppies, nepeta, peonies, geraniums, a feast…
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Stepped planters seen outside a hotel in Maida Vale, London, last week.Nigel Boldero aka 'Old School Gardener'
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