The Hotel American of 1898-1900 in the Leidse Plein in Amsterdam by Willem Kromhout (1864-1940) illustrates how boldly Berlage’s line was taken by other local architects, and his relative originality even outrivalled. But the lead came in Kromhout’s case not from Berlage, but from Cuijpers’s nephew Eduard (1859-1927), a transitional figure whose work deserves more attention outside Holland than it has generally received. Kromhout’s touch is lighter than Berlage’s, as is also, to make a poor pun, the colour of his pale buff bricks, but his expression of structure is less ‘real’ and more frankly fantastic. In the detail of the exterior, and even more in the interiors, he was undoubtedly seeking to create a sort of Dutch alternative to the Art Nouveau, not curvilinear or naturalistically ‘organic’ but richly decorative in a semi-abstract way. The intention was worthy; the result, alas, is rather tawdry.

It was not in the design of sumptuous individual buildings but in low-cost housing and in city-planning that Berlage himself was most active in the next fifteen years. In 1908, for example, he prepared a plan for the extension of The Hague, and in 1915 a more ambitious one for Amsterdam. He had built his first blocks of flats in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam in 1905. These are much less Romanesquoid than his earlier work but they are equally brusque as to the detailing. However, his architecture shortly grew much suaver. Berlage’s finest work of any period, perhaps, is not in Holland but in the City of London, Holland House of 1914 at 1-4 Bury Street, E.C. This has a reticulated façade of moulded terracotta members more Sullivanian than Richardsonian in its verticality (Plate [138B])—and by this time he certainly knew Sullivan’s work.

The influence of Berlage in Holland was by this time very great and the esteem in which he was held—at least as much for his doctrine of direct structural expression as for his executed work—by no means restricted to his own country, since his writings were published in Germany as well as in Holland.[[437]] Yet, to foreign eyes, the achievement of the new school that grew up partly under his inspiration in Amsterdam is greater than his own. The work of this ‘Amsterdam School’—for it was soon so called—which flourished particularly in the decade 1912-22 is at times very close to that of the German architects influenced by Expressionism in the early twenties; but it began much earlier and has a strongly autochthonous flavour.[[438]] German Expressionism never inspired a building more stridently angular than the Scheepvaarthuis that J. M. van der Meij (b. 1868), a pupil of Eduard Cuijpers, built to house dock offices on the Prins Hendrik Kade in Amsterdam in 1912-13. The most extreme example of the abandon with which twentieth-century Dutch architects set out on new paths, this opened the way for the housing work of van der Meij’s assistants Michael de Klerk (1884-1923) and P. L. Kramer (1881-1961), both also pupils of Eduard Cuijpers, which represents internationally the greatest Dutch contribution to modern architecture. As the master of these three, Eduard Cuijpers, despite his own historicism, has perhaps as much right as Berlage to be considered a father of the Amsterdam School. Their work, moreover, has some analogies not only with German Expressionism but also with Wright’s contemporary Baroque phase of 1914-24. However, the crystallization of de Klerk’s personal style preceded the beginning of Wright’s influence in Holland and, when that influence began during the years of the First World War, it operated in fact to counter the extravagances of the Amsterdam School.

Early buildings by de Klerk, such as the first Eigen Haard Estate housing blocks that were designed in 1913 and erected round the Spaandammerplantsoen on the west side of Amsterdam, have a quaintness that recalls English or American work of a generation earlier rather than van der Meij’s aggressive angularity. They look almost as if they were especially fanciful projects of the Shingle Style that happened to be executed in brick instead of wood. But the elegant underscaled local brick is handled with extraordinary virtuosity, and the façades achieve a stage-set-like unreality in sharpest contrast to the often dreary matter-of-factness of low-cost housing produced in other countries in these same years. Although the first Eigen Haard blocks were, in planning and general organization, as straightforward as Berlage’s, they have a warmer human touch such as architects elsewhere—Behrens, for example, or the Scandinavians—either missed entirely or attempted to attain by a parsimonious use of more or less ‘traditional’ detailing.

The extension of the Eigen Haard Estate along the Zaanstraat, begun in 1917, represents perhaps the peak of de Klerk’s achievement (Plate [156B]). Here the many curved wall elements bring out the special qualities of Dutch brickwork; and the rather heavy wooden window-frames, brought forward as in Hoffmann’s Stoclet house to the wall-plane, give continuity to the plastic modelling of the façades. Highly imaginative, even whimsical, features of detail, such as the barrel-like corner oriel, give an air of good humour, and even of the outright humorous, that is rare in any other architecture, ancient or modern; but these features are for the most part truly architectonic, not merely decorative. De Klerk’s whimsy is never nightmarish, in the way Gaudí’s can be, nor loud and aggressive like van der Meij’s. His highly personal style can be considered a sort of barocchino of the early twentieth century.

The extreme point of de Klerk’s invention is seen in the post office that occupies the apex of the later portion of the Eigen Haard Estate. This is like nothing so much as a child’s toy enlarged to architectural scale in some contemporary setting for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.[[439]] After this his work grew somewhat simpler and more orderly. Already the blocks he designed in 1920 for an area round the Henriette Ronnerplein in the De Dageraad Estate on the south-east side of Amsterdam are more regular and restrained; the plainest of all is the very long continuous range near by in the Amstellaan built in 1921-2.

Also in the De Dageraad Estate, in the portion that runs down both sides of the P. L. Takstraat, along the Burgemeester Tellegenstraat and into the Talmastraat, Kramer showed himself even more of a virtuoso in the handling of curved wall elements of brick—here brown and buff—than de Klerk (Plate [156A]). Projected in 1918 and built in 1921-3, Kramer’s scheme combined tall and very plastic features at the street intersections with notably straightforward three-storey ranges in between. Thus he produced an extensive urbanistic ensemble of great homogeneity of character, yet very considerable variety of visual interest, and with a quality of craftsmanship perhaps superior to de Klerk’s. But by the time this was completed Kramer had become even more chastened than de Klerk in his last work in the Amstellaan. In Kramer’s Amsterdam West housing, begun in 1923, the façades are plain and flat with continuous bands of white-sashed windows. Thus these blocks are definitely related to the direction that modern architecture was taking in Holland as in France and Germany in these years at the hands of men of Kramer’s own generation (see Chapter [22]).

Kramer’s De Bijenkorf department store of 1924-6 in the Grotemarktstraat in The Hague, however, still retains much of the plastic exuberance of his earlier housing blocks and is executed with a sumptuous range of fine materials. Kramer here employed at large scale the curved surfaces of brickwork characteristic of De Dageraad, with notable success. Many Amsterdam canal bridges of these years illustrate also his virtuosity at elaborate semi-abstract detail carried out with excellent craftsmanship in wrought iron and carved or artificial stone. Moreover, in the mid twenties the Amsterdam City Architect’s office exploited with real success in various school and police buildings a manner closely approaching that of de Klerk and Kramer.

Unfashionable even in Holland for a quarter of a century, the work of the Amsterdam School merits that more sympathetic examination which the Art Nouveau has now for some years received. At its best the work of de Klerk and Kramer from the mid teens to the mid twenties has survived better than all but the finest contemporary achievements of Wright and Perret, partly because it was so well built in the first place and has been so well maintained ever since. Without being, in the proper sense of the word, Expressionist, it yet has close analogies with the Expressionist approach. It may be considered to stand in a relationship to the work of Höger and Poelzig in Germany somewhat comparable to that of Gaudí to the Art Nouveau of Brussels and Paris; for it is at once independent of outside influence and superior to the foreign work that it most closely parallels. But the Amsterdam School did not occupy the entire Dutch scene even in these, its best, years.

In no European country was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright studied earlier and with more enthusiasm than in Holland; Berlage was one of Wright’s greatest admirers after his visit to America in 1911. The influence of Wright’s work up to 1910, known through the Wasmuth publications, began to be evident in the later years of the First World War. Dirk Roosenburg (1887-1962), Jan Wils (b. 1891), J. J. Van Loghem (1882-1940), and several others were notably Wrightian in the early twenties; and the magazine Wendingen, edited by H. T. Wijdeveld (b. 1885), continued through the mid twenties to bring Wright’s later buildings and his projects of those years to European attention, notably devoting to him a magnificent series of special issues in 1925 which constitutes a document of signal importance for the study of his work of this period. The first German book on Wright after the Wasmuth publications did not appear until the next year, and the first in French only in 1928.