Museum Het Schip

Historic · Spaarndammerbuurt (West)Amsterdam,Netherlands

A block of 102 Amsterdam dock workers' flats of 1919, built to eighteen different plans, crowned by a tower with no floors, stairs or door.

Het Schip is a block of dock workers' flats with a tower nobody can enter. The tower at the sharp end has no stairs, no floors and no door: it is a hollow wooden frame clad in roof tiles. Michel de Klerk put it there because the corner needed a vertical mark, and for no other reason. It went up in 1919 and holds 102 flats. Councillors asked whether this was too much for working people. The housing alderman Floor Wibaut answered that workers were owed buildings that were good and also beautiful, and the block went up. Walk round the outside and the wall keeps changing: the 102 flats were built to eighteen different plans, so windows, doors and balconies almost never repeat. Neighbours call the rounded corner flats the cigars. It is still social housing, and you can circle it and cross the courtyard at any hour. The museum has the old school and post office on the Oostzaanstraat side, where one flat is furnished as a 1920s tenant would have had it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The outside is free and is most of the point — this is lived-in social housing, so the whole perimeter and the courtyard can be walked at any hour without paying or booking anything.
The tower is on the Hembrugstraat side, the museum door is on Oostzaanstraat — walk the block first and go in afterwards, or you will pay for a ticket and miss the shape.
Count window shapes along one facade — the flats were built to eighteen different plans, so openings, doorways and letter slots change every few metres as you walk the wall.
Find the rounded corner flats — neighbours call them the cigars, and they are the clearest place to watch brick being bent into a curve that brick does not naturally take.
The same style went on to shape whole districts — from 1922 this way of handling brick was applied to entire neighbourhoods a few kilometres west, not just to showpiece blocks like this one.

Things to do

1
Step into the court and find the tenants' meeting hall
Go through the opening into the court behind the block. The small meeting hall Eigen Haard built for its tenants stands here, and the facades that face inwards are quieter and plainer than the street fronts. People live around you, so keep to the paths and keep your voice down.
2
Sit in the old post office counter hall
The museum's core room is the post office De Klerk designed down to the counters, the lamps and the woodwork. It closed as a post office at the end of the 1990s and was kept as it stood. It is small, and it is the only interior in the block you can see complete.