Beurs van Berlage

Landmark · Damrak (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

Amsterdam's old commodity exchange, built with its iron roof left showing instead of dressed in ornament, and now given over to concerts.

The Beurs van Berlage is Amsterdam's old commodity exchange, and Hendrik Petrus Berlage refused to dress it up. Where public buildings of the time hid their structure behind plaster and columns, he left the iron roof trusses bare above the brick and let each material keep its own surface. His first drawings were still loaded with Dutch Renaissance ornament, and he stripped them back over several years until only decoration tied to the structure survived. It is usually treated as the moment Dutch architects stopped copying older styles. It went up between 1896 and 1903. Berlage was a socialist and expected the building to outlive trading and pass into public use one day. That is more or less what happened: the securities dealers left for a new building in 1913, the last trading floor closed at the end of the 1980s, and concerts and exhibitions fill the halls now. The clock tower carries a different line on each side: beidt uw tijd, bide your time, faces the city, and duur uw uur, make your hour last, faces the station.

Worth knowing

Good to know

From the street it reads as a closed brick box, so get inside if you can — the corner cafe and the through-passage are normally open in the daytime.
Look for the two clocks on the tower — one faces the station and one faces the city, and each carries a different line from the same poem about not being in a hurry.
Find where the iron meets the brick — Berlage left the junctions visible on purpose, so the roof trusses sit on the masonry with nothing plastered or boxed in to hide the connection.
The great hall is a hired venue, not a museum — what you see depends entirely on what is booked that week, and some days none of the interior opens.
The tower's outline came from Italy — Berlage took it from the thirteenth-century Torre del Popolo in Brescia, which is why it sits so oddly among the tall narrow fronts of the Damrak.

Things to do

1
Find both clock faces and their mottoes
Stand on the Beursplein, find the tower and note which motto faces you. Beidt uw tijd, bide your time, is the line turned towards the city. Walk round towards the station side and you find duur uw uur, make your hour last, facing the people arriving. Both lines were aimed at traders who were in a hurry.
2
Walk the through-passage
A public passage cuts through the ground floor between the Damrak and the Beursplein, normally open in the daytime. It takes a minute, and it is the easiest way to get inside the building and see how thick the walls are and how the brick is laid.
3
Turn your back on it and look at the Damrak
Face away from the exchange and take in the row of tall narrow fronts opposite. Berlage's block is one long horizontal against dozens of verticals. That is what made it shocking in 1903, and it is why the building is so hard to fit into a single photograph.