Het Schip

Find the tower. It rises out of a low wing of the building like a mast. People named the whole block Het Schip, the Ship, because of its shape. It was a popular nickname, and it stuck.

“It rises out of a low wing of the building like a mast.”

This is workers’ housing, built for the housing association Eigen Haard. The Housing Act of 1901 had set money aside for decent homes for people with little. Before that, poor families in Amsterdam often lived together in a single room. Here the flats had several rooms, flush toilets and plenty of light, and those on the ground floor had gardens. There were 102 homes, now 82, with a school, a post office and a small meeting hall.

The architect was Michel de Klerk. He was born in 1884 into a large, poor Jewish family. At 14 he was spotted by the architect Eduard Cuypers, who saw his gift for drawing and took him on. On a roughly triangular plot, De Klerk worked bright red brick into a tower, curves and rounded corner bays. Some people at the time thought a man who treated tradition like this was simply insane. Even the national monuments register calls the block one of the most irrational high points of the Amsterdam School.

De Klerk designed the post office too, down to its stained glass and its wall clock. It is the only interior of his that survives complete. He died in 1923, on his 39th birthday.

When the post office closed, Alice Roegholt and Ton Heijdra put on an exhibition in it in 2001, for the hundredth birthday of the Housing Act. It grew into a museum of the Amsterdam School, which since 2016 has been housed in the old school. The homes are still homes, and Eigen Haard still owns them.