Introduction
In 1838, the famous publisher of guidebooks, John Murray, described one of the magnificent church buildings in the centre of Amsterdam as ‘rather barren of interest’; a view that was subsequently adopted by Karl Baedeker and other guidebook publishers.Footnote 1 This comment is characteristic of the way nearly all Dutch buildings were viewed during this period, both by experts and by writers of travel guidebooks, who based their judgment upon specialist handbooks. Those who travelled to Amsterdam were directed towards the harbours, the canals and locks, the Jewish quarter and the Dutch old masters. When it came to architecture, the Dutch capital simply had little to offer. There were two exceptions: the Royal Palace (former Town Hall, then known as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’) on Dam Square and, interestingly, the Portuguese Synagogue. They owed this exceptional status to their classicist design by renowned architects and the significance of their historical associations.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, this rather strict judgment on the built environment changed completely.Footnote 2 The churches were not only described in greater detail, including stylistic interpretations and information relating to significant historical transformations; some parts were even considered ‘beautiful’. Many other buildings came into focus as well: both old buildings, now considered as ‘heritage’, and new architectural complexes and even previously unrecognized areas of the city. Their representation in guidebooks differs dramatically from that of only a few decades earlier. While the nineteenth-century tourist in Holland was directed towards buildings merely in terms of their interiors, treasures and collections on display, the twentieth-century tourist was instructed to focus on formal aspects, especially on the exterior. The city’s architecture, which received its own aesthetic and meaning ascribed to it, appeared to have the power to tell its own story.
The increased appreciation of architecture in Amsterdam was the result of many factors. An important one – just as in any other historic city – was the huge increase of photographic images from the end of the nineteenth century. Second, the standards and values that were used to evaluate and contrast buildings with one another had changed over time. Much of what was considered worth seeing was now determined by an architectural system of values and the evaluative associations attached to it.Footnote 3 A decisive and often overlooked factor, however, was the rise of professional knowledge of architecture, and its dissemination. After all, knowledge of what you see makes that which is seen an entirely different object. Or, according to the well-known anthropologist Dean MacCannell (in his effort to nuance John Urry’s focus on the purely visual nature of the tourist gaze): knowledge and information is needed in order to give meaning to the visual images one perceives.Footnote 4 This so-called ‘second gaze’, that is structured by cognitive understanding rather than the visual image (i.e. the ‘first gaze’), is under-researched, although its impact can be seen in travel guides. As these guidebooks show us, knowledge of architectural styles and their histories was clearly still absent in the mid-nineteenth century. However, towards its end, travel guides increasingly included insights from architectural history, reflecting the emerging art historical approach that also inspired the preservation movement. This created a distinctly different and more appealing image of the city.
The history of Amsterdam as a tourist city has so far been described mainly from the point of view of city marketing. Several historians have examined how Amsterdam increasingly promoted itself from the end of the nineteenth century, a story in which world exhibitions, tourist organizations and museums played a leading role.Footnote 5 Together, these accounts provide insight into the tourism business from the inside, and the many parallels between sightseeing practices and urban planning strategies. The drawback of the ‘promotion perspective’ – focused on actors whose general aim was to make money from tourism – is that the changing ‘sightseeing value’ of the city is implicitly linked to these promotional actions. Besides, this approach does not tell us anything about how all these and other objects were looked at, that is, about the general perception or meaning of what was there to be seen. Apart from the role of promoters – who indeed played a role in the commodification of the city – the amount of information on sights available as well as the chosen narratives were also important factors, as they determined the (general) perception of sights. After all, the shift in perception of the built environment – that is, as ‘architecture’ became ‘heritage’ – was key to the success of the historic city as a tourist attraction. This specific relationship between tourism and architecture has yet to be fully explored.Footnote 6
Drawing on English, German, French and Dutch travel guides published between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, this article explores the evolution of the tourist gaze on architecture in Amsterdam. Travel guides are crucial media that show tourists the way, explain what there is to see and invite focused and precise viewing.Footnote 7 The travel guide as a genre is also an interesting historical source through which it is possible to trace the changes in how the built environment was represented as aesthetically and historically valuable and to identify the values and ideas which shaped these changes. This article aims more specifically to unravel how knowledge about architectural history was imbricated in the narratives presented in tourist guidebooks.Footnote 8 It does so for two types of architecture: ‘historic’ seventeenth-century buildings, and ‘modern’ buildings and complexes, designed by the so-called Amsterdam School of expressionist and modernist architects. In each case, very different parties were at work, and at different speeds, and knowledge circuits were created differently. But in both cases, the result was the same: more engagement in (local) building histories led to greater understanding of, and more love for, the built environment. In both cases, when knowledge about architecture – whether produced by professionals or enthusiasts – entered the guidebooks, it resulted in a new image of the city that made it more worth visiting (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Henry Havard’s interest in the local peculiarities of Dutch architecture fits perfectly with broader nineteenth-century notions of the picturesque and the appreciation of vernacular building types. H. Havard, La Hollande pittoresque: le coeur du pays (Paris, 1878).
Historic buildings and the seventeenth-century architectural ensemble
Several historians have acknowledged the growing attraction for tourists of the built environment in the Low Countries at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of nationalism, the production of national clichés, the advent of photography and mass media, mass culture and the first signs of a heritage preservation industry, the latter being also driven by the powerful idea of the picturesque.Footnote 9 This changing perspective on the city as a matter of visual and material substance with a symbolic meaning is all but unique. As Eric Zuelow has demonstrated in his overview of European tourism history, touristic successes were hardly entirely the domain of specific national actors but pre-eminently the result (being after all part of) a transnational system of global forces and flows.Footnote 10 Major metropolises like London and Paris set the tone in many respects; cities like Berlin, Brussels and Amsterdam followed suit.Footnote 11 Even publications as specific and original as Henry Havard’s popular series La Hollande pittoresque (1874–78) and Amsterdam et Venise (1876) should be seen in this context. Havard’s interest in the local peculiarities of Dutch (and Italian) architecture, which were widely promoted by these bestsellers, fits in perfectly with the ‘universal’ late nineteenth-century interest in the picturesque, that is, ‘indigenous’ building types and ‘everyday’ settings.Footnote 12
However, if we try to grasp precisely what guidebooks made people look at, this turns out to have been very variable. Contrary to what one might expect, even the canal zone, the appreciation of which as a unique urban ensemble had not yet penetrated the general public, was not presented as a major tourist attraction. We can see this reflected in guidebooks by the end of the nineteenth century which, although they already allocated buildings a bigger place compared to half a century earlier, when John Murray published his first guidebooks, still did not address anything specific. Façades of large buildings were briefly described at most and the many smaller buildings in the city were not even noticed. The star rating system reflected this perspective. Sights marked with an asterisk were reserved exclusively for works of art and museums, not for buildings. The limitations of this approach were highlighted in the lament of Leo Simons, a citizen of Amsterdam and author of Amsterdam in stukken en brokken (Amsterdam in Bits and Pieces, 1891) that his hometown was in a neglected state and hopelessly lagging behind beautiful cities abroad that ‘showed themselves’ to visitors.Footnote 13
The meaning of Amsterdam’s buildings visibly changed as background information revealed the nature of their original appearance. The first field in which knowledge was developed was that of conservation. In Amsterdam around 1900, as in many other cities in Western Europe, various groups comprising preservationists, artists and historians began to worry about the fragility of the city’s beauty: the Dutch Antiquarian Society (Nederlands Oudheidkundige Bond, founded in 1898), the Society Amstelodamum (concerned with the history of Amsterdam, founded in 1900) and, a little later, the national heritage association Heemschut (1911, modelled on the German Heimatschutz). By immersing themselves in the city archives, compiling atlases and collecting drawings and prints, they acquired specialist knowledge of antiquities and the city’s history.
Closely linked to the concept of the picturesque cityscape (het schilderachtige), which entered Dutch architectural discourse in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the study of historic Amsterdam was also driven by the threat of demolition and transformation plans that endangered the old city’s very survival. During these years, under the policy-driven aim of turning the city centre into a business hub, Amsterdam underwent rapid and dramatic change. Among the most damaging interventions were the demolition of the fourteenth-century pilgrimage destination Heilige Stede in 1908 and the dismantling of the Jewish neighbourhoods Uilenburg, Marken and Rapenburg in the 1910s and 1920s.Footnote 14 Admirers of historic beauty were not only scholars and archivists, but also claimed an active role in public debate. An often-cited tipping point in the historiography of Amsterdam is the Reguliersgracht issue in 1901, the first successful action of the newly founded Society Amstelodamum. The booklet Stedenschennis (Urban Desecration) by painter Jan Veth and wine merchant D.C. Meijer was an ardent plea against the planned demolition of the Reguliersgracht, one of the radial canals in the now world-famous ring of canals.Footnote 15 Due to their lively approach and the attention it drew in the local and national press, these actions mark the beginning of Amsterdam’s struggle for city preservation.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the burgeoning preservationist concept of the value of the historic city found its way into the world of tourism. We see this clearly in the making of a new kind of domestic travel guide, involving experts from the heritage world. A good example is the Reisboek voor Nederland (1922), a publication of the national tourist association ANVV (Algemene Nederlandse Vereniging voor Vreemdelingenverkeer). In many respects, this was a conventional travel guide. Yet, on closer inspection, it reveals itself to be much more than that. What stands out is the remarkable attention given to a wealth of historic buildings, almost all dating back to the ‘Golden’ seventeenth century, many of which had previously been scarcely mentioned or completely overlooked in earlier guidebooks, such as the ‘beautiful courtyard’ of the East India House, City Bank (Stadsbank van Leening), the Old Walen Church, the gateway of architect Hendrick de Keyser’s Spinhouse (a sixteenth-century penitentiary for women) and the recently restored ‘House on the Three Canals’.Footnote 16 Another striking element is the interest in residential architecture, such as courtyards and canal houses, of which minor features such as gable stones and architectural details were noticed and named. Never before had the historic city centre been described in such detail, as an intrinsic part of a tourist visit – let alone in a ‘national’ guidebook.
In parallel with the new focus on architectural ‘heritage’ was the new type of language used in the guides, expressing a clear interest in historical events and even a certain architectural-historical idiom. Several domestic guidebook writers began to mention stylistic features, report on historical facts and mention the names of important designers. This is a huge difference from some 30 years earlier, when guidebook writers had little to say about Amsterdam’s architectural history. The Reisboek came fairly close to being an art and architecture handbook. The reason behind this change is simple: just as the art sections had been written by art specialists connected with the large Dutch museums, the architectural descriptions were the work of one of the main figures in the field of architecture and architectural preservation: the architect Adriaan Willem Weissman (1858–1923). As both an architect and the author of one of the first architectural history surveys, Weissman had plenty of knowledge to draw on.Footnote 17 Besides, Weissman was connected to virtually all the preservation groups, and had been the driving force behind the founding of Heemschut in 1911, making him one of the earliest advocates of historic preservation.Footnote 18 By choosing Weissman, the national tourist association ANVV had thus brought in an antiquities expert pur sang, which produced a visibly different guide.
The most remarkable aspect about the travel book is the focus on the canal belt as a sight in its own right. For the first time, the three main seventeenth-century canals – Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht – were presented in a travel guide as an urban ensemble, being far superior to the other canals. They were presented as being among the ‘most beautiful and peculiar parts’ of the city, ‘the like of which cannot be found anywhere in the world’.Footnote 19 It was not the interest in the canals themselves that was new, but the idea of an urban ensemble; a ‘ring’.Footnote 20 The most beautiful views of the city, as seen from the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht, were even given stars; the correct viewing directions were marked with arrows on the city map. Apart from the intertwining of the world of heritage and tourism, the travel book shows how knowledge and appreciation of historic architecture reached a wider audience in this way. In fact, the authors were well aware that the battle for conservation began by promoting a love for and interest in the beauty of the old among the widest possible audience. Learning about the historic built environment, admiring the beauty of the old city and the act of consumption were seen as going hand in hand.
In the following years, more guidebooks of this subgenre were produced by semi-specialists attached to antiquarian societies, with the aim of widening the circle of antiquarian enthusiasts among both residents and (initially, Dutch) visitors. An important step in this case was the first historical ‘walking guides’ that heritage associations produced with increasing regularity from the 1920s onwards. Examples include the Historische Gids van Amsterdam (Historical Guide to Amsterdam, 1929) published by the local heritage society Amstelodamum, written by historian A.E. D’Ailly. Also well known was the Gids voor Amsterdam published by the national heritage association Heemschut, which went through many editions in the 1940s, written by architect Abel Antoon Kok.Footnote 21 As this type of guide was highly specialized and far too comprehensive for the ordinary tourist, it is very unlikely that it was widely read outside this circle of architectural enthusiasts, which in these years was made up largely of amateur historians, artists and architects. Nevertheless, the emergence of this type of guide reflects an increasing intertwining of the tourist and professional worlds. What is interesting is the kinship between the tourist gaze and look of the connoisseur, between the ephemeral consumer and the committed activist. Like ‘ordinary’ tourists, antiquarian enthusiasts sought ‘the curious and the beautiful’, focused on aesthetic experience and history, on local distinctiveness, on ‘authenticity’. Just like tourists, the admirers of urban beauty gazed at the city through a filter of familiar images, although not only the well-known seventeenth-century paintings of Cuyp and Van de Velde which ordinary tourist guidebooks usually referred to, but also the cityscapes of Van Beerstraten and Berckheyde and the modern painters Breitner and Witsen.Footnote 22 Like ordinary tourists, the more professional guides ordered the city according to its sights. They no longer saw it merely as their hometown or as a historical document, but gradually fell under the spell of the fleeting, superficial image. For them, too, the city became a picture.Footnote 23
The next stage in the process of knowledge transfer was reached by more easily readable guides, for example the bestseller En nu…Amsterdam in! by Ton Koot (1941).Footnote 24 Koot was a heritage activist (connected to Heemschut), publicist on the history of Amsterdam and, since 1940, deputy director of the Amsterdam tourist association, the so-called VVV.Footnote 25 The book, intended to awaken the latent tourist in every resident or countryman and encourage inhabitants and visitors to actively discover the lesser-known parts of ‘their’ city, not only failed to point out the usual highlights but delved far deeper into the city and its history, just like Weissman did for the Reisboek (1922), picking elements from heritage guidebooks like D’Ailly’s (1929). Again, the emphasis was on the cityscape as a whole, especially on the ‘proud canals’. The charm of the canals lay precisely in the effect of the whole cityscape. ‘It is not the individual façade that makes the stranger and the city dweller feel immediately at home in an atmosphere of cosiness’, writes Koot, ‘but the series of façades with their captivating variety of pavements, cellar entrances, window openings, cornices, with their shades of colour, stone and shade’ (Figure 2).Footnote 26
Figure 2. Two examples of Dutch-language guidebooks with a strong focus on architectural heritage, written by professionals. Left: Ton Koot’s book En nu…Amsterdam in! (1941) was a bestseller. Right: Gids voor Amsterdam written by architect A.A. Kok (1947).
However, Koot went a step further than his predecessors by not only praising the usual suspects, that is, the sumptuous ‘Golden Age objects’, but by shifting the focus to much simpler artefacts and ordinary building types, which were in fact little more than contractors’ architecture, and, moreover, often in a dilapidated state. But for Koot, it was in the bulk of the built environment that the heart of Dutch identity was to be found: ‘Nowhere are the main elements of Dutch architecture, a picturesque look coupled with architectural beauty, more strikingly expressed than in our simple and vernacular warehouses.’Footnote 27 In doing so, Koot was the first to reach out to the general public by providing the contextual background necessary to see what had always been there (Figure 3). Passages like this show us that there was a subtle yet active flow of information from a group of enthusiasts to the field of tourism promotion, with the aim of recruiting a larger audience in their campaign to preserve the historic city. However, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, architectural expertise and historical knowledge – and consequently, the appreciation of the city as an architectural masterpiece – were restricted to a rather specific circle of local, exclusively Dutch-speaking Amsterdam-lovers. An international readership was even further away. Since the architectural history profession was still very much in the early stages of development and thus concerned with its own ‘national’ heritage, an international perspective was almost non-existent before World War II, making the exchange of information across borders difficult.Footnote 28 It was not until the 1940s that the government started to work on more vigorous promotion to ‘the outside world’, initially all compatriots. In 1940, the National Commission for the Preservation of Monuments (Rijkscommissie voor Monumentenzorg) issued the so-called Kunstreisboek (Art Travel Book), published in several volumes per province.Footnote 29 The idea was copied from Switzerland, where the Kunstführer der Schweiz (1934) had been published a few years earlier.Footnote 30 Despite not being an entirely new genre, the Art Travel Book represents an important step in the popularization of architectural knowledge, as it was the first guide in which the government bridged the gap between heritage conservation and tourism. Somewhat ironically, the timing was excellent. The state of war had made travel outside the country’s borders nearly impossible, a situation that ‘forced’ Dutch tourists to discover their own country.
Figure 3. Map from Kunstreisboek (Art Travel Book) (1940), a guide written by heritage conservation experts. Compared with nineteenth-century tourist maps, the large number of heritage sites – including smaller structures such as houses, minor church towers and ‘hidden’ courtyards – is striking. After World War II, this selection was incorporated into foreign tourist guides.
The transfer of architectural knowledge about Amsterdam beyond national borders expanded after the war. An important publication which reached an international audience, for example, was A Guide to Dutch Art (1952), written and financed by the Dutch Department for Heritage Conservation.Footnote 31 Like an international Art Travel Book, the guide not only portrayed the objects that Baedeker, Guides Bleus or Blue Guides had offered for a long time, but offered a wide array of heritage artefacts. The publication was explicitly driven by the need to offer the ‘numerous foreigners visiting our country’ an overview of Dutch art in a responsible way and was funded by the national government.Footnote 32 It is not always clear to what extent the foreign publishers of travel guide series had close contact with Dutch cultural institutions (since the guides almost always lack sources), but the effect of such guides seems to be obvious. From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, we suddenly see a large number of old objects seeping into mainstream foreign travel guides, including the German Holland-Führer, the French Guides Bleus and the English Blue Guides.Footnote 33 Buildings that until then had been overlooked – in brief, all those smaller and ‘hidden’ built structures that aficionados of antiquity had long before pointed out in their own guidebooks – all of a sudden were popping up in the foreign guides.Footnote 34 How exactly this information got in there is not clear, but the fact that this focus on Amsterdam’s history and monuments now reached an international audience is evident. The result of all this was a different international image of Amsterdam, nourished by locally provided information and knowledge of the city’s history. Buildings that were previously little more than a backdrop were now identified as buildings by name, their histories were narrated and specific details highlighted. It was this second gaze that was a necessary precondition to make heritage suitable for mass consumption.
New architecture: the Amsterdam School and the modern movement
The path of knowledge transfer with respect to modern architecture developed very differently and even ran in the opposite direction. The inclusion of brand-new architecture in tourist guides was not the work of local groups, as in the case of historic architecture, but of the international movement of modern architects. The knowledge and information available in the field of modern architecture and housing – a key issue in the period after World War I – had grown spectacularly in a short space of time. This was largely due to the emergence of professional associations, magazines and an innovative architectural climate in which architects of international reputation were grouped together. These architects knew each other’s designs and there was a lively exchange between peers through magazines, exhibitions and working trips. They were clearly aware of the most notable advances in this field.
This is clearly reflected in non-Dutch guidebooks. When new housing estates were built in Amsterdam in the late 1910s and early 1920s in accordance with the latest ideals of public housing, several tourist guidebooks immediately described them as important landmarks. These include the first socialist experiments in public housing by the young architect Michel de Klerk in the Spaarndammerbuurt (located just behind the railway tracks, and quite close to the city centre), and the southern city expansion Plan Zuid (1915). The latter was designed by the renowned Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage, but completed by architects working in brick expressionist style: the so-called Amsterdam School. It is striking how eagerly guidebooks such as Baedeker and Guide Bleu picked up on these new forms of architecture, even prior to their completion. Guidebooks referred to a set of characteristics that made the works worth seeing: the uniformity, the imaginative imagery, the innovative, socialist élan that emanated from them, but also the scale on which they were built. The districts have ‘une telle unanimité…qu’elles n’étonnent plus que les étrangers’, wrote the Guide Bleu (1933).Footnote 35 The French guide was surprised by the ‘completely new formula’. For Baedeker, the link between public health ideals and aesthetics came into play. In Baedeker (1927), the author Franz Dülberg praised the combination of spatial experience and fantasy in the work of Michel de Klerk, among others, which was so wonderfully compatible with social and hygienic principles.Footnote 36 The ‘national’ architectural language was another interesting asset, as evidenced by statements such as ‘un style véritablement national’ (by the Guide Bleu, 1933) (Figure 4).Footnote 37 Besides social housing complexes, public and commercial buildings also attracted the guidebooks’ attention. The work of architect Jan Wils in particular was highly rated: both the Olympic Stadium (1928) and the adjacent Citroën Garage (1929) received two stars almost immediately after completion. This was even higher than the social housing complexes by De Klerk (one star), and much higher than the Royal Palace on Dam Square, once Amsterdam’s top attraction, which in most guides (Dutch and non-Dutch) lost all of its stars.Footnote 38 These high sightseeing scores of modern architecture were exceptional, not only because the cement was barely dry, but especially because, unlike works of art in museums, thus far buildings had been barely eligible for such star ratings. Moreover, in the case of social housing complexes, schools and garages, the buildings were not even open to the tourist public.
Figure 4. Two well-known examples of Amsterdam School architecture. Top: the ‘De Dageraad’ social housing complex at Henriette Ronnerplein, designed by Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer. Bottom: social housing and post office at Spaarndammerplantsoen, designed by De Klerk. Photos: Amsterdam City Archives, date unknown.
What explains all this interest in modern Amsterdam architecture? The focus guidebook writers placed on recent innovations was in fact disproportionate, especially when compared to cities like Berlin or Frankfurt, where similar revolutionary housing programmes took place, but about which guidebooks wrote only sparingly. Obvious reasons for this difference can be sought in the guides’ own classifications. Unlike Martin Wagner’s Berlin and Ernst May’s siedlungen in Frankfurt, which were radically modernist and rather sterile in appearance, or the more old-school idiom of the English garden cities, a great quality of the architecture of the Amsterdam School indeed lay in its utterly original and rich artistic vocabulary, a fortunate circumstance that owed much to the imagination of the young architect Michel de Klerk, the great inspirer behind the expressionist movement.Footnote 39 The scale and uniformity was another extraordinary asset, a credit to Arie Keppler and Floor Wibaut, who, as heads of the Urban Housing Department (Keppler) and Public Works Department (Wibaut), were the great trailblazers of social housing neighbourhoods that count as Gesamtkunstwerken. Footnote 40 Not only the architecture, but also bridges, street furniture and sculptures were co-designed in this process. In addition, the neighbourhoods were realized in a visual language that was distinctly ‘local’ (or, from a tourist perspective, ‘national’), even bearing the name of the city in which it celebrated its heyday. In fact, these were aspects that perfectly satisfied the desires of tourism.
Despite all the increased attention in popular tourist guidebooks, we may question the tourist importance of these districts. It is obviously rather implausible to assume that the general public would have abandoned the seventeenth-century Royal Palace on Dam Square en masse in exchange for a visit to the Citroën Garage. Equally, it is hard to imagine that tourists on a three-day trip to Amsterdam would indeed have spent a third of their time visiting popular housing experiments, as some guides would later suggest.Footnote 41 The strong focus on recent urban renewal and architecture should therefore be mainly explained by the speed of the international transfer of architectural expertise. This is evidenced by the fact that international travel guide writers relied on recent architecture books. Unlike knowledge of Amsterdam’s history – cultivated within the ranks of local clubs and associations and, quite significantly, usually written in Dutch – the information on Modern Dutch architecture was widely and internationally accessible, in the form of non-Dutch editions for both professional audiences and laymen. Extensive material on the Amsterdam School in particular was available in many formats: through publications, extensive documentation and photographic material. This is evidenced by the reference in the Blue Guide (1933) to three (very recent) publications: Dutch Architecture of the XXth century (J.P. Mieras and F.R. Yerbury, 1926), Modern Dutch Buildings (F.R. Yerbury, 1931) and Bouwen. Bauen. Batir. Building- Holland (1932), a documentation folder by the Dutch architect J.B. van Lochem published with a foreign audience in mind.Footnote 42 Although today we tend to associate ‘modern’ with the modernists, ‘modern architecture’ was to be understood in a broader sense at the time, as the books portrayed both architectures: that of the ‘local-looking’ brick expressionist architecture of the Amsterdam School, as well as the ‘universal’ looking white modernist objects like Duiker’s open-air school (these buildings as well were soon to be included in travel guides, presumably through the same books).
Moreover, knowledge in the field of modern architecture that spread so rapidly during these years was also stimulated by the leading role the Netherlands played on an international level. With artists like Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg, the Netherlands was part of the avant-garde when it came to art and design. The fact that as important an event as the International Urban Planning Congress in 1924 took place in Amsterdam – where 500 people from 28 different countries visited the city in order to exchange knowledge in the field of architecture and town planning, and in so doing reached a broad audience of town planners, architects, engineers and above all (Dutch) administrators – may have contributed to the international recognition of Dutch architecture and the public visibility of Dutch architects (Figure 5).Footnote 43 Another indication of the greatly expanded role of art and architecture experts in the tourism industry were the sections on art in the guidebooks. A contribution by German art historian Franz Dülberg (specializing in Dutch art) appeared in Baedeker (1927) and Guide Bleu engaged art historian Emilie Tillion.Footnote 44 Some guides even included the topic of public housing in their general introductions to Amsterdam, announcing it as a new chapter in the city’s history.Footnote 45 Baedeker was the most accurate: the German guide was by far the best informed when it came to recent architectural innovations. For instance, it was the only one to mention the importance of the Public Works Department and to use the term ‘Amsterdamer Bauschule’.Footnote 46 The general message that these art contributions wanted to convey was that – apart from ‘Golden Age art’ – the Netherlands was also to be regarded as the country of avant-garde architecture and urban planning. This is an interesting fact. Not only because the country (and Amsterdam specifically) was now retroactively attributed an architectural tradition; but also because the blocks were labelled exemplars of mastery in urban planning– even before the ring of canals was framed as such. Indeed, the idea of the ring of canals as an urban planning masterpiece had long been fostered in local heritage circles but had not yet been picked up in foreign guidebooks (Figure 6).
Figure 5. Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam, designed by Jan Wils for the 1928 Olympic Games, rated two stars in foreign guidebooks. Photo: Amsterdam City Archives, c. 1935.
Figure 6. Promotion of modern architecture in Amsterdam, Venetië van het Noorden (Amsterdam, 1928), a booklet issued by the Amsterdam tourist organization ’t Koggeschip.
The path of knowledge transfer, in this case from abroad to the domestic level, is the reverse of what we have seen in the previous section on seventeenth-century architecture. Dutch guidebooks were initially slow to promote their modern creations. It is true that some guides published in 1928, the year of the Olympic Games, took advantage of the opportunity to promote new residential neighbourhoods around the Olympic Stadium (including images).Footnote 47 However, the amount of attention paid to it lagged behind what might have been expected, especially since foreigners at the same time rated the Olympic Stadium with two stars and, situated in the south of Amsterdam, the stadium was virtually surrounded by all the novel examples so highly praised in foreign guidebooks.
It was only later, and probably thanks to the gaze of outsiders, that the Dutch themselves began to promote their novel side more vigorously. It is interesting to see how this narrative process took form. As the Dutch guidebook publishers of the 1940s already had the knowledge of the old city and its history, and as they had already constructed a narrative around it, a different narrative now emerged in which the old and the new architecture were juxtaposed. Once again, the booklet En nu…Amsterdam in! (1941) is an interesting example. Author Ton Koot praised Berlage as the first successor to the seventeenth-century master builders and describes the new urban extensions as ‘the Amsterdam Regent style in its boldest form’.Footnote 48 Another guidebook published by the national tourist office in 1944 stated: ‘This is the new Amsterdam, which we show to strangers with as much pride as the canals of the Golden Age!’Footnote 49 Fresh black and white photographs exuding the promise of a bright new era were contrasted with dreamy images of barrel organs, ramshackle boats and ice skaters on the seventeenth-century canals.Footnote 50 Pride, it seems, was indeed the driving force, for the new housing complexes – so radically different from the heritage sites – did not require safeguarding. In both the old and the new city, the lines between tourist promotion and urban pride had become thoroughly intertwined in the minds of local experts.
From the 1950s onwards, most Dutch guidebooks showed a similar incorporation of modern architecture. After World War II, many guidebooks had a walk through ‘Modern Amsterdam’.Footnote 51 The area of Berlage’s Plan Zuid was a favourite; the list of sights in this area has become endless.Footnote 52 Amsterdam’s social housing was now one of the main sights, part of the same tradition as seventeenth-century urban planning. According to the Nagel’s Guide (1951), they even scored almost equally: a canal cruise, a visit to the Rijksmuseum and a stroll through the Old Town was to be followed by a walk through the south.Footnote 53 For some guides, the post-war garden cities in the west were also worth a visit, as a modernist sight representing the new age. The history of the new and the old then miraculously fitted into the same tourist image, part of the same tradition. From rich Golden Age façades to public housing ideals, and from old warehouses to the post-war modernist plan – it all showed the ‘miracle of Dutch urban planning’.Footnote 54
Conclusion
This article has shown that architectural knowledge and appreciation is of great significance for the tourist perception of the city. With the development of professional knowledge of antiquities and architectural history and its dissemination to the tourism industry, both old and new architecture featured more prominently in the tourist picture. Travel guides show the increase in knowledge and dissemination, cultivating a different image of the city. Dissemination ran through successive knowledge circuits and depended on the type of architecture. In the case of historic architecture, the path of knowledge transfer ran from inside to outside: from heritage associations, through local institutions like museums to the tourism industry. Only after some time did it find its way to foreign guides. In the case of modern architecture, it was exactly the other way round. Driven by the international avant-garde, where knowledge in the field of modern architecture and urban planning was subject to fast and lively exchange, interest in each other’s innovations arose far and wide and across borders, as a result of which books appeared. With the mere existence of international editions, foreign guidebook writers picked up the information earlier than local guides. Dutch travel guide writers followed suit.
Even if the paths of knowledge transfer differ, the analysis of travel guides shows how professional expertise and appreciation steer the gaze. As new information reaches tour guides, the contextual background shapes new narratives giving buildings and districts a face and meaning. Whether they have been there for centuries or have been built recently, a so-called ‘second gaze’ on these buildings is crucial to see what there is to see. This aspect is often overlooked because, unlike explicit advertising, it is a subtle, implicit and rather invisible form of promotion. Importantly, unlike official promotional bodies and other city marketeers, who have a clear profit motive, these ‘architecture promoters’ had no direct interest other than to safeguard invaluable heritage and to convey their fervent admiration for new artistic creations that affirmed the status of their city – works that seemed so aligned with the achievements of the past. Driven by missionary zeal, the love of antiquity and modernity and local pride have gone hand in hand with architectural consumption and sightseeing purposes. By unravelling these invisible flows of information, this research aims at nuancing the history of tourism and contributing to a better understanding of the tourist gaze.
Open access
