De Dageraad: The Dawn of Amsterdam School Housing
Why is it significant?
Stand at the corner and let your eyes follow the brick: it curves around the corner like a wave, climbs into rounded towers and rolls down again under roofs of orange tiles. The windows sit in little rhythms, the balconies bulge, and nothing is quite straight. It looks like a palace or a ship.
Key Facts
| Place | De Dageraad: The Dawn of Amsterdam School Housing |
|---|---|
| Address | Pieter Lodewijk Takstraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35000, 4.89950 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the corner and let your eyes follow the brick: it curves around the corner like a wave, climbs into rounded towers and rolls down again under roofs of orange tiles. The windows sit in little rhythms, the balconies bulge, and nothing is quite straight. It looks like a palace or a ship. It was built as homes for working families.
This is De Dageraad, the Dawn, named after the socialist housing association that commissioned it. It went up around 1920, designed by two architects of the so-called Amsterdam School, Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, as part of the plan for south Amsterdam drawn up by Hendrik Berlage. There are 294 apartments and six shops, and the site was originally reserved for a hospital, whose planned layout still shapes the blocks.
What was revolutionary was the idea behind the brick. Since the Housing Act of 1901, associations like this one could borrow public money to build decent homes, and these architects decided that workers deserved beauty as well as plumbing. They treated brick almost like clay, modelling it into curves and towers, so that an ordinary family coming home from the factory walked into something that looked like a monument.
Michel de Klerk did not live to see the movement he led grow old. He died in 1923, aged only thirty-nine. And look at the names of the two squares in the complex: Henriëtte Ronnerplein and Thérèse Schwartzeplein. Henriëtte Ronner-Knip was a painter famous across Europe for her cats, and Thérèse Schwartze was the most sought-after portrait painter of her day. In a neighbourhood named after men of the Golden Age, two women finally got their streets.
The complex became a national monument in 1974, and a small museum about this architecture opened inside it in 2012. From here, walk east towards the Tolstraat, where a red-brick castle once full of diamonds is waiting.