Beurs van Berlage

When this opened in 1903, people hated it. They had expected a palace for money, with columns and statues, and were given a brick wall.

Look at the buildings around it, and at Centraal Station up the street. That is what an important building was supposed to look like in the 1890s: turrets, gables, borrowed bits of the Renaissance. Hendrik Petrus Berlage thought all of that was dishonest. A wall, he said, should look like a wall.

So he built the exchange out of millions of plain red bricks and left them bare. Where iron trusses hold up the roof inside, you see the iron. Where a stone carries a load, it is shaped for the load and nothing more. Architects came from across Europe to look at it, and much of what was built in the Netherlands for the next thirty years starts here.

There is a joke hidden in it. Berlage was a socialist, designing a temple for commodity traders. He worked with a poet and with artists who shared his politics, and the tile pictures and verses inside are about labour and the future of mankind, not profit. He is said to have expected that capitalism would not last, and that the building would one day serve the whole community as a public hall.

He was half right. The traders moved out, and today the trading floors are used for concerts and exhibitions. In 2002 the future king and queen were married in a civil ceremony here.