Philanthropy

The first coordinated social housing projects in Europe began popping up toward the end of the nineteenth century. In lieu of government support, the vast majority were funded by wealthy philanthropists and religious administrators. In Amsterdam, one early such figure was Meijer de Hond, a Jewish theologian. Barred from joining guilds and unable to work on Saturdays due to the Sabbath, many of the city’s Jewish residents — having fled to the Netherlands to escape persecution elsewhere in Europe — lived in poverty. While the desire to alleviate poor conditions was widespread, de Hond insisted that relief efforts should be based on a combination of liberal economic philosophy, community organizing, and scripture, and certainly not the alluring routes of socialism and communism.

“Despite his sincere concern for his fellow Jews,” Ariane Hendriks and Jaap van Velzen write in their history of Jewish Amsterdam, “de Hond wanted nothing to do with social reform. For him, religion was the only viable option: if Jews stuck to the teachings of the Torah, socialism would not be necessary.”

Fellow Jews who favored a more centralized approach to the problems of the day disagreed vocally. When, at the annual meeting of an association aimed at turning Jewish street-peddlers into skilled laborers, de Hond waxed poetic about seeing children help their fathers push their heavy fruit carts across the canals, one of these fathers responded: “I’d rather dump my wares into the water!”

Unfortunately for the likes of de Hond, religious and capitalist philanthropy quickly proved unable to uplift Amsterdam’s Jews, let alone the working class in its entirety. Not only because the people who required financial assistance far outnumbered those giving that assistance, but also because, as Hanneke van Deursen explains in The People’s Housing: Woningcorporaties and the Dutch Social Housing System, these projects were ultimately unprofitable for-profit enterprises.

The 1901 “Housing Act” replaced these private enterprises with actual nonprofits, funded by long-term, low-interest loans from the government. The act itself coincided with — and was indeed made possible by — a wave of socialist electoral victories. In 1902, Pieter Jelles Troelstra made history by becoming the first socialist politician to enter the Dutch House of Representatives, while fellow socialist Henri Polak joined Amsterdam’s Municipal Council. An even bigger socialist triumph arrived in 1914, when the influential Social-Democratic candidate Florentine “Floor” Wibaut was elected as the city’s alderman, assuming responsibility for the newly formed cooperatives and connecting them with like-minded architects from the Amsterdam School.

Practical Design

Born from and indebted to the broader Expressionist tradition, the Amsterdam School strove to create modern architecture that did not exchange humanitarian values for cold-blooded futurism. Their source of inspiration was not the automated assembly line, but old-fashioned, manmade craftsmanship, evoked by way of their intricate bricklaying patterns, decorated doors, windows, and staircases, and frequent collaborations with sculptors. Amsterdam School architects also believed that form should correspond to function — so, the design of a building should reflect its purpose and its users.

These principles are evident in the work of Hendrik Petrus Berlage, an architect who, although central to the Amsterdam School, oscillated between many different styles during a long and accomplished career. Above all concerned with practicality, Berlage seldom designed buildings without first taking stock of their immediate surroundings, measuring their proximity to parks, shops, and bathhouses and, if these amenities were located too far away, incorporating them into the buildings themselves.

Other Amsterdam School architects sought to balance practicality with aesthetics, treating their profession as both an art and public service. Perhaps the most famous social housing block to come out of the school was Michel de Klerk’s Het Schip (“The Ship”), built between 1917 and 1920, north of Amsterdam’s canal ring. The block’s name is derived from its residents, most of whom worked in the nearby shipping district of Spaarndammerbuurt. In terms of aesthetics, Het Schip featured courtyards, turrets, and gables reminiscent of a naval base, as well as murals designed by the celebrated sculptor Hildo Krop — a baker’s son and employee of the Amsterdam Department of Public Works. In terms of practicality, the building came with its own school and post office, the latter of which contained one of Amsterdam’s first telephones — especially useful given that many working-class residents were still illiterate.

Social Advance

For utopian socialists like de Klerk and Berlage, architecture was not simply an expression of socialist values, but a means of directly creating a socialist society. In the words of Hendriks and van Velzen, “[Berlage] thought he could use architecture to take society to the next stage — a stage where peace and equality reigned supreme. That’s why he broke with 19th century architectural traditions, which focused on individual buildings, divided by roads and moats, in favor of interconnected courtyards, squares, and housing blocks.” Neighborhoods like Transvaalbuurt were built specifically “for the new man, the class-conscious laborer — someone who not only deserved their new living space, but also knew how to put it to good use.”

The slightly arrogant undertone of these passages — reminiscent of the language used in many early Soviet art manifestos, which likewise spoke of the coming of a new man — points to the Amsterdam School’s greatest flaw: its concern with reforming the working class in its own, bourgeois image.

To ensure residents put their social housing to good use, the city government appointed quasi-commissarial overseers tasked with “teaching them how to live” outside the slums — a process that turned out just as patronizing as it sounds on paper. “They must learn to treat one another as human beings,” one overseer wrote of the challenges they faced, “and build a sense of community to resolve conflicts with neighbors, improve personal hygiene, tame the destructive impulses of youth, and altogether conduct themselves in a manner befitting of their residences.”

The condescending nature of such programs wasn’t lost on their participants. In a 1957 book, author Piet Bakker asks a resident of the Transvaalbuurt if his new neighborhood compares favorably to the demolished slums of Uilenburg. “And how!” the man responds. “We used to have to go out into the street to pick a fight, because there wasn’t enough space indoors. Nowadays, we can just brawl it out in the living room!”

Even the designs of some of the social housing blocks could be seen as patronizing insofar as they were meant to shape or reinforce the collective identity of their inhabitants. Het Schip, with its turrets and other maritime images, strongly associated its worker-residents with their profession, narrowing the separation between their work and steadily growing access to leisure. Another well-known block, De Dageraad (“The Daybreak”), reminiscent of a traditional Dutch farmhouse, was designed to comfort its residents as they transitioned from farmland to life in the big city. These compounds were, in a sense, life-size dollhouses, with the architects dressing up the people living inside them as they saw fit.

“Nothing can be clean or beautiful enough for our workers,” the aforementioned overseer trumpeted, “having been forced to suffer so much.” But that beauty and cleanliness, Hendriks and van Velzen retort, was “nonetheless imposed” onto the worker without their input, and often at the expense of their practical, material needs. Intricate designs and decorations drove up construction and renovation costs, took up space that could have been used for bigger kitchens and windows, and, in the case of Het Schip, insufficient noise cancellation and fire safety measures — all of which gave rise to a palpable atmosphere of alienation.

“Our neighborhood was dreamt up by the city’s strongmen,” author H. M. van den Brink writes in his 1998 novella Over het Water (“Across the Water”), itself based on historical documents, “socialist patriarchs who saw it as their sworn duty to provide the entire population with roofs and walls. Only in theory did they recognize the right that this population had to homes of its own taste and choosing. . . . The bricks had been assembled into the strangest shapes and patterns — not at the request of the tenants, but in service of the aesthetic whole. Our homes weren’t really ours, we were merely allowed to live inside them.”

Gentrified

Criticism of the Amsterdam School and its social housing projects mounted during World War I when the city government’s budget shrank to the point that it could no longer finance the school’s increasingly ambitious plans. The opposition reached its crescendo following World War II, after the Netherlands — unlike in World War I, when it remained neutral — suffered a German invasion that destroyed numerous Dutch cities, including bombed-out Rotterdam. This situation made cheaper, less ornamental social housing the only viable alternative. Over the following decades, the unique constructions of Het Schip and De Dageraad made way for buildings that, though uniform and cookie-cutter in their appearance, were not only more spacious and practical, but also more affordable. The more of these newer buildings entered the market, the more the Amsterdam School’s creations rose in value, gradually replacing its working-class tenants with city elites.

Today reception of the Amsterdam School is mixed. Politically, its social housing helped further the socialist cause, with neighborhoods like Transvaalbuurt — nicknamed Het Rode Dorp (“The Red Village”) — becoming hotbeds of socialist activity. Jewish workers rapidly abandoned the liberal and religious musings of de Hond in favor of this other big-C Cause. They formed labor unions, art clubs, and homeowner’s associations, subscribed to and distributed socialist newspapers like Het Volk (“The People”), and met in socialist cafes like De IJsbreker on the river Amstel. Many of the laws and provisions that helped turn the Netherlands from a capitalist empire into a modern welfare state originated during this period.

“The demolishers have done their job,” one resident from Transvaalbuurt said, providing a counterweight to the more critical writings of Bakker and van den Brink, “to the jubilation of us residents. In my youth, I had seen the slums of Marken and Uilenburg, and consider myself fortunate that, in old age, I could witness the spacious apartments that took their place.”

Yet, the Amsterdam School’s work often failed to meet workers’ material needs, with elaborate construction plans leading to higher rental prices (a room at Het Schip cost 4.79 Dutch guilders, while rooms in other buildings could be procured for as little as 3.15 guilders: a substantial difference for turn-of-the-century laborers ), necessitating the post–World War II reforms mentioned above. Ultimately, the school’s experiments should remind contemporary architects and urban planners that low rents and secure access to the amenities on which we rely are top of most residents’ concerns. If art should be made as accessible as possible, the kitchen table may not be the best place to start.