knowledge germany & benelux The Netherlands
ttglive.com
Time to go Dutch?
With nine Unesco World Heritage Sites to its name, the Netherlands offers much more than the clogs, tulips and more hedonistic attractions some clients might expect, says Ian Shine
drained swampland and built something new around the city,” explains Piet van Winden, director of the canals’ forthcoming Het Grachtenhuis museum.
Amsterdam’s canals marked a groundbreaking development in the history of town planning and are a beautiful tourist attraction
ay “Amsterdam” to most people and they immediately think of “coffee shops” and the red light district, but the reality is that both make up an ever-shrinking proportion of a city steeped in history.
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An initiative called Project 1012 will see 40% of the city’s brothels closed down by 2014, while 26 of its coffee shops are also earmarked for closure.
Such re-invention is nothing new for the Dutch, who have been at the forefront of
The Rietveld Schroder House has radical sci-fi interiors 54
11.03.2011
innovation in so many fields for the past 500 years – from their Golden Age of painters in the 17th century to their “total football” of the early 1970s, but most notably in their architecture and town planning. Many of the Netherlands’ nine Unesco World Heritage Sites reflect this, as I found out when I visited three of them.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY. CANAL RING. What Unesco says: “A masterpiece of hydraulic engineering and town planning. Testimony to a significant period in the history of the modern world.” What it is: Three huge canals that wrap around the south and west of Amsterdam’s central old town, constructed when the Dutch realised around 1600 that they needed to expand the city to house its increasing population.
“Instead of destroying the city to create a new one [as was common practice] they
This approach had a profound influence on how the rest of the world would be put together over the next 300 years. What remains is a grand canal city in the spirit of Venice and St Petersburg, packed with elaborate but skinny houses (taxes were levied according to width of canal front taken up). The new Het Grachtenhuis museum, due to open on April 1, is styling itself as a “gateway” to the canal ring with interactive exhibitions – including a room where visitors experience city views as if from the bottom of a canal. Who to sell it to: Older culture heads who like Venice, St Petersburg or Prague, and shopping addicts of any age who will love the boutique “nine streets” shopping district locked inside the canal ring. ■
herengracht386.com ■
de9straatjes.nl/uk
RIETVELD SCHRODER. HOUSE. What Unesco says: “An icon of the modern movement in architecture and an outstand- ing expression of human creative genius in its purity of ideas and concepts.” What it is: A somewhat sci-fi house built by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 and located in Utrecht, an easy 30-minute train ride from Amsterdam. Its simple horizontal planes, stark whites and primary colours repre- sented a radical architectural move that is still cutting edge today. Commissioned by a Mrs Schroder who wanted less-defined boundaries within her house, the upstairs has completely movable walls and windows that fold out of the house, as well as wacky but practical space and time-saving contrap- tions, such as a handle to close a downstairs door from upstairs.
The house looks like a Mondrian painting and embodies the concepts of the De Stijl art
Sally Shine
Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions
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