Pakhuis de Zwijger: The Warehouse with a Bridge Through It
Why is it significant?
Stand on the quay and look at the long concrete-and-brick warehouse in front of you. Now follow the bridge coming off the island opposite... and watch it run straight into the building and come out the other side.
Key Facts
| Place | Pakhuis de Zwijger: The Warehouse with a Bridge Through It |
|---|---|
| Address | Piet Heinkade 179, 1019 HC Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37680, 4.92210 |
| Part of Walk | Ships, Silos and a Red Python: Modern Architecture of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the quay and look at the long concrete-and-brick warehouse in front of you. Now follow the bridge coming off the island opposite... and watch it run straight into the building and come out the other side. Cyclists pedal right through the middle of a warehouse as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
This is Pakhuis de Zwijger, built in 1933 and 1934 as a cold store, a refrigerated warehouse for perishable goods coming off the ships. Its name means William the Silent, after William of Orange, the father of the Dutch Republic, who was famous for keeping his thoughts to himself. The architects gave it the plain, powerful lines of the interwar years, with few windows, because a fridge does not need a view.
By the 1990s, the harbour was gone and the city was planning the new neighbourhoods on the islands. A bridge was needed from this quay to Java-eiland, and the old cold store stood exactly in the way. It was supposed to be demolished. But people campaigned and signed petitions, the building was declared a national monument, and in the end the engineers did something wonderful: they built the bridge right through it.
The bridge carries the name of Jan Schaefer, the former pastry baker who became Amsterdam's alderman for housing from 1978 to 1986, and who pushed hard for building homes for ordinary people instead of offices. His most famous line was that you cannot live in hot air. It is rather fitting that his bridge refused to knock down a building just because it was in the way.
Today the old cold store is a centre for debates, lectures and exhibitions about the city and its future, a silent warehouse that now does nothing but talk. Take the Jan Schaeferbrug, through the building and over the water, onto Java-eiland.