Dutch architecture

“ Wrightian ideas were readily accepted by many Dutch architects previously inspired chiefly by Berlage, not to speak of their influence on Berlage himself. Admiration for Wright’s work undoubtedly played a real part in the rapid modulation of Dutch architecture towards greater severity and a more geometrical discipline in the twenties. But the major significance of the lively Dutch interest in the American lies in its effect on the development of a few younger men in these years. ”

“ These French books may, therefore, have influenced his style, but they did not dominate him so much as to cause him to copy the French type of plan in designing an English house. The same may be said of the Dutch influence on his elevations. Only in the one instance already mentioned did he embody a whole piece of Dutch design into one of his own. But in his chimneys, his strap-work gables, and his turrets or lanterns he drew from Dutch sources. ”

“ Despite the continuing vitality of the Amsterdam School through the mid twenties, the new Dutch school associated with Rotterdam rose rapidly in national and international significance. Oud, [485] indeed, brought the new architecture to maturity in Holland in precisely the same years as Le Corbusier and their German contemporaries; Rietveld and several others made signal contributions also, in Rietveld’s case perhaps equal in importance to Oud’s. ”

“ The Renaissance in Belgium is best exemplified, after all, by minor works and ordinary dwellings, many of which have considerable artistic grace, though they are quaint rather than monumental (Fig. 190) . Stepped gables, high dormers, and volutes flanking each diminishing stage of the design, give a certain piquancy to the street architecture of the period.
HOLLAND. Except in the domain of realistic painting, the Dutch have never manifested pre-eminent artistic endowments, and the Renaissance produced in Holland few monuments of consequence. ”

“ Room seems to open out from room in a miraculous manner, and there is apparently no end to the space that can be made within the four walls. At times, baffling despair fills the mind at the attempt to master the anatomical intricacies of the Dutch abode. The early Dutch house is practically all upon the ground floor, but the attic, occasionally, is almost as complex in its mysterious arrangement. The Dutchmen and their wives were past masters in ordering the economy of space. The bulk of household gear they could stow away in compact style always excites our wondering admiration. ”

“ There was no attempt at symmetry of plan in the arrangement of these houses but the walls were pierced with doors and windows wherever convenience dictated their presence. The Dutch house was almost invariably set close to the ground and it is this fact, together with their restful roof lines, that gives so many of the old Dutch dwellings their aspect of thorough repose. As stated before, the Dutch preferred to live downstairs and only used the attic for bedchambers when force of circumstances made it necessary. The two chief rooms of the house were the kitchen and the best parlour. ”

“ Many of the buildings are very old, and a favorite style of architecture is to have the front project several feet forward over the street. The tops of opposite buildings often almost meet. I don’t see why they do not meet and come down kerwhack, but they don’t. Imagine these quaint streets with old Dutch houses, white and blue, with red tiled roofs, and green and yellow thrown in to give them color, with angles and dormers and curious corners, the tops projecting toward one another, and you can see how interesting a Dutch street can be if it tries, as it does in Dordrecht. ”

“ Quaintness is the word that everybody uses spontaneously to express the character of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, and the treatment of these unequal gables is obviously derived from Flemish examples. The origin of their crow steps and ailerons is unmistakable, and the treatment of the grouped and somewhat huddled openings, and their wreathed pediments and bull’s-eyes, richly and heavily framed in terra-cotta, is equally characteristic, to the point of being baroque. ”

“ It has been stated that the interior woodwork was generally painted white and that the rough walls were ordinarily whitewashed, but while speaking of the paint it should not be forgotten that the Dutch had a wonderful eye for colour and, though the interiors of their houses presented an aspect of spotless white, the exteriors rejoiced in chromatic brilliancy that at times was positively dazzling and, even in its weatherworn stages, presented a lively appearance that could not fail to attract the attention of the most unobservant. ”

“ The gambrel roofs of the Dutch houses have come to be commercial commodities and are continually resorted to—no, are continually parodied, I mean to say—by modern builders who cannot tell what this immutable art principle we are talking about may be. ”

“ The chief feature in the old Dutch rooms was the fireplace, and many of these old fireplaces are of cavernous proportions. The chimney breast almost invariably extended well into the room and the spaces on either side were often filled with built-in cupboards, or else with deeply embayed window seats. Very little attempt at decoration was made in the panelling of the over-mantels and indeed there was often no panelling at all but the rough plaster of the wall was whitewashed. The walls were exceedingly thick, often two feet or more, and this gave deep reveals to the windows. ”

“ Small bedrooms were tucked away back of the parlour and kitchen, while sometimes a great living room took the place of the kitchen on one side of the hall and the kitchen was pushed into the ell extension at the rear. Thanks to the lack of formality in the plan of the Dutch house, it was capable of indefinite growth and in that respect the architecture was profoundly affected by the mode of life of the occupants. ”

“ It is an architecture absolutely without orders. In some rare cases, there are mantels with little Tuscan columns, but they are not among the finest examples and are found side by side with freer forms. The over-mantels {36}often ... show a very rare use of fluted pilasters.
“A freer and very exquisite channelling was often used, which is found in many houses with slight variations. The theory of all these Dutch mouldings is a series of many fine parallel lines and shadows made by hollows, beads, and fillets, beautifully varied in proportion, all very delicate in scale.” ”

“ Excessively spiky, this seems almost to have borrowed back from G. G. Scott the more Germanic features of his Broad Sanctuary terrace in London of fifteen years earlier. But the Neo-Gothic of the seventies and eighties in Germany is in general no more aggressive and gawky than the popular Meistersinger mode that revived so turgidly the forms of the Northern Renaissance (see Chapter 10) .
Holland, which made almost no significant architectural contribution in the first half of the nineteenth century, now produced in P. J. H. Cuijpers (1827-1921) a sort of Dutch Viollet-le-Duc. ”

“ While it is quite true that stepped gables are characteristic of many Dutch buildings, the attribution of Dutch influence in the treatment of the Old State House can scarcely be justified for there is nowhere else observable any suggestion of Dutch tendencies and the precedent for stepped gables in unmistakably English work of an earlier date is by no means wanting. ”

“ In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur—the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. ”

“ Holland makes considerable pretensions as to originality of style in a curiously incongruous creation at the north of the Fine Arts Palace. During the last twenty years a peculiarly inadaptable type of building has been developed in Holland by a group of younger architects. Many of these buildings are suggestive of stone rather than of brick construction, and they do not fit in very well into the architectural traditions of the Dutch - builders traditionally of the finest brick structures in the world.
The Holland building at the Exposition is not typical of that great and independent people. ”

“ The arts in their several branches made considerable progress in the Netherlands during this epoch. Architecture was greatly cultivated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; most of the cathedrals and town houses being constructed in that age. Their vastness, solidity, and beauty of design and execution, make them still speaking monuments of the stern magnificence and finished taste of the times. The patronage of Philip the Good, Charles the Rash, and Margaret of Austria, brought music into fashion, and led to its cultivation in a remarkable degree. ”

“ The Nieuwe Kerk would be nothing without its tower—it is one of the barest and least interesting churches in a country which has reduced to the finest point the art of denuding religion of mystery—but the stadhuis would still be wonderful even without its Betsy, There is nothing else like it in Holland, nothing anywhere quite so charming in its shameless happy floridity. I cannot describe it: the building is too complicated, too ornate; I can only say that it is wholly captivating and thoroughly out of keeping with the Dutch genius—Spanish influence again apparent. ”

“ Across the market place from the Town Hall rises the Groote Kerk, and, just beside it, the old meat market, erected in 1602, and said, by those who know, to be the quaintest brick and stone Renaissance building in the Netherlands. The Groote Kerk is of a graceful cruciform shape and around the edges of its buttresses, like chicks peeping from under the protecting wings of the mother hen, are built a number of curious little one-story houses whose interiors suggest the last word in coziness and cleanliness, and where the much maligned Dutch decorative taste may be seen at its best. ”

“ After our friends had done justice to a good dinner at one of the famous hotels of The Hague, they left their bicycles at the hotel, and took the steam-tram to the "Huis ten Bosch," which is Dutch for "House in the Wood." It is one of the royal palaces of Holland and is situated in the midst of a beautiful wood. The forests of Holland are very much prized because there are so few of them, and so this "House in the Wood" is one of the favourite royal residences. ”

“ Until the middle of the seventeenth century, Flanders may be said to have overshadowed Holland in the field of Decorative Art, although, as we have seen, the two most important designers of domestic furniture—De Vries and Crispin van de Passe—were Dutch. The reason of Flemish preponderance was that the sovereigns and regents resided at Mechlin, Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp, and to those courts the ablest men in the arts and crafts naturally flocked. With the decay of Antwerp, we enter the period of the Flemish Decadence, and Amsterdam rises to wealth and power at her rival’s expense. ”

“ The Exchange, on the contrary, which stands facing the palace, and has a porch sustained by seventeen columns, is known as the door without a house; a joke which every Dutchman makes a point of repeating to strangers, with the slightest possible smile curling his lip. Whoever arrives in Amsterdam in the first week of the Kermesse, which is the Dutch carnival, may behold a curious spectacle within this building. ”

“ Just as in regard to painting and sculpture, the Netherlands was the seat of some extremely beautiful artistic work of great originality and perfection of detail during this period. There is scarcely an important town of Belgium, and even a number of those that have become quite unimportant in our time, which does not present some architectural monument of cardinal importance in the history of architecture. ”

“ A picturesque shadow will redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures. ”

“ The Dutch people are industrious, and cleanly. The women are the most active and nicest house-wives in the world; they scour and brighten, and rub not only the furniture and inside of their houses, but the outside as well; the houses in Holland, by-the-bye, look like painted baby-houses, and are roofed with glossy delft tiles, and the rooms are lined with smooth square tiles of delft, and the floors paved with marble. ”

“ It still exists in a dismantled condition. Its picture plainly shows the stone ledges within the fireplace, the curved iron lug-pole, and hanging pothooks and trammels. With ample fire of hickory logs burning on the hearthstone, and the varied array of primitive cooking-vessels steaming with savory fare, a circle of laughing, black faces shining with the glowing firelight and hungry anticipation, would make a "Dutch interior" of American form and shaping as picturesque and artistic as any of Holland. ”