Amsterdam City Archives 15th of may 2016

Entrance of the City archives

For a small fee you can have a guided tour of the City Archives of Amsterdam on a Saturday/Sunday afternoon. We enlisted for the tour on Saturday.

Today Amsterdam is swamped with tourists. Think of beerbikes, potsmoking & beerdrinking blokes and stagparties. Fortunately it´s quieter in the vicinity of the City Archives. A little later than we had planned we start the tour. Strangely enough me and miss Snel are the only participants. The Tour guide told us that normally the tour has more participants. We don´t have a problem with that at all. We start at one of the upper floors. Everything looks rigorous with lots of horizontal lines, dark oak colours and white paints.

This building has been built for the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Dutch Trading Company) which has the current name of ABN-AMRO after some mergers in the past. The name of the building is ´de Bazel´, named after architect de Bazel. De Bazel started as a carpenter and worked himself up to the post of architect. He was a student of Cuypers (yes, the same guy that created the Rijksmuseum and the central station of Amsterdam) although his style totally differs from Cuypers´ style.

We look down from the communication room (there are two small phoneboots) into to the large hallway. De Bazel is clearly more influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright than by Cuypers.

View of the main hall

The airvents stand out because they are not hidden and are part of the whole design. Beautiful tiles cover the floor. We continue the tour to a room intended for lower management personnel. De Bazel was an avid supporter of ´total design´. Everything in the building has been designed by him: from chairs to the wooden panels hiding the central heating. The spaces are spare and functional but not without luxury. It´s amusing to see that the materials that have been used in a room get more expensive as the user of the room becomes more important within the management structure. For example: we start with oak paneling and we end up with rosewood panelling.

Part of the main hall

Next to the building is another building of the NHM, designed by Marius Duintjer. It´s a typical 70ies building with lots of glass, lots of brown hues and on top of the building a terrace (it has to be cosy & transparent in the seventies!). The two buildings are connected by a tunnel that leads under the canal that separates the buildings. Nowadays it is bricked up and it is called ´de poentunnel´ (the tunnel of cash´).

After talking about the two buildings we come into the oddest room within ´de Bazel´. This office meeting place had been refitted and comes from an old canal house. Unfortunately this room is made entirely in Barok style and does not fit with rest of the building. De Bazel was forced to use the size of the room proportionally in the rest of the building. He had his sweet revenge by placing this room on a not so prominent location within the building.

The boardroom has been situated in such a way that contact between ´common´ staff and the big boss would be almost non-existent.

Treasure Room of ´de Basel´

Only at the entrance of the building it was impossible or staff and management to avoid each other. Upper Management even had it´s own small lift.

The Satined glass windows at the staircase have a Gothic feel to them (just like Cuypers would have designed) but they still fit the building. We use the stairs to descend to the basement. In the enormous safe is a ´treasure room´ where important pieces from the City Archives are shown. This space has been repainted (just like Tunanchamons´ tomb)as intended for the original building. We say are goodbyes to our charming guide and we use the rest of our time to look at the pieces shown.

You can visit the treasure room for free. It´ll cost you about an hour of your time but it´s definitely worth it.

Wout