Stedelijk Museum

This museum has two fronts, and they do not look related. On the Paulus Potterstraat it is red brick striped with pale stone, with a stepped gable and a small clock tower. On the Museumplein it is a smooth white tub, raised off the ground above walls of glass.

The brick came first. A.W. Weissman, the city architect, designed it, and the years of building, 1892 and 1894, are carved on the street front. It opened in 1895, paid for in good part with money from a rich widow, Sophia Lopez Suasso, and from a family of bankers. It was not yet a museum of modern art. Beside paintings it showed militia banners, dolls, an eighteenth-century kitchen and an old pharmacy. The statues in the niches are painters and master builders of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Modern art took over slowly, and it changed the rooms. In 1938 Willem Sandberg, a curator who later became director, had the red and yellow brick walls inside painted white, so that the art would stand out. White became the colour of the house.

In 2003 the fire brigade had the worn-out building closed. The architects Benthem Crouwel won the job of renewing it. They left Weissman’s building almost whole, lifted part of the new wing into the air and sank the rest underground. They also moved the entrance from the street to the square. The museum reopened in September 2012, and the nickname was waiting: the bathtub.

Look at the tub. Its skin is 271 panels of a material made with a synthetic fibre that is also used in ships, aircraft and tennis rackets. And it is white for a reason. Mels Crouwel, the architect, said that everything was painted in Sandberg’s colour. What Sandberg did to the rooms inside, the bathtub wears on the outside.

“What Sandberg did to the rooms inside, the bathtub wears on the outside.”