Het Scheepvaarthuis

Landmark · Waalseiland (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

An Amsterdam office block shaped like a ship's bow, its brick, stone and iron carved throughout with seas, winds and merchants of the Indies.

Het Scheepvaarthuis stands on a plot that narrows to a point, and Johan Melchior van der Mey shaped that point like a ship's bow and put the front door in it. Around two hundred specially moulded bricks, sandstone carving and wrought iron cover the walls. The carvings were planned as one connected subject, which is seafaring. Four groups beside the doors stand for the world's four seas, four figures on the tower point to the four winds, and carved heads of merchants, navigators and governors of the Indies run round the walls. Six shipping companies paid for this building and shared it, which is why one office block carries the ambition of six. It went up between 1913 and 1916 and is usually called the first building of the Amsterdam School, a way of building that treats brick as something to be modelled rather than stacked. Their ships had sailed from the water you are standing beside, which is why the door faces it. By the time they moved in, their ships had stopped using it. Since 2007 everything behind these walls has been a hotel, so the building you can read is the one on the outside.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Pick out one of the carved heads — they are named sixteenth- and seventeenth-century merchants, navigators and colonial governors, among them the map-maker Gerard Mercator and Jan Pieterszoon Coen.
Plan on the outside, because the inside is a hotel — the famous stairwell, the decorated boardrooms and the working paternoster lift are reached only as a guest or on an occasional tour.
The lane beside it is the Buiten Bantammerstraat — named after Bantam in Java, where the first Dutch fleet to the East Indies made land in 1595.

Things to do

1
Stand at the point of the bow
Go to where Prins Hendrikkade meets the Binnenkant and put yourself directly in front of the doors. The two walls close in to a single vertical line, the sculpture of the four seas frames the entrance, and from that one spot the building stops looking like an office.
2
Cross to the Oudeschans bank to see the whole flank
Walk over to the Oudeschans bank or the far side of the Waalseilandsgracht. The whole flank comes into view at once. The roofline and its ironwork stand out against the sky, and you can see how the building narrows towards the point. Late afternoon puts the sun on this face.
3
Hunt the carved heads
Follow the walls at first-floor height and count the portrait heads set on the corbels. There are around twenty-eight, all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures, and no two faces repeat. Some sit too high to read from the pavement, so a longer lens helps or you accept losing a few.