Red Brick Dreams: Amsterdam School, Het Schip & the Western Islands

From a royal city gate and a Victorian gasworks to Michel de Klerk's palace for workers, the old timber harbours and the drawbridges of Amsterdam's 17th-century shipyard islands

Amsterdam · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Haarlemmerpoort

Haarlemmerplein 50, 1013 HS Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stand at the edge of Haarlemmerplein and face the pale gate with its row of columns, looking for all the world like a Greek temple that took a wrong turn into a Dutch square. This is the Haarlemmerpoort, and it is a lovely little paradox... a city gate built at the very moment city gates stopped mattering.

It went up between 1838 and 1840, designed by the city architect Cornelis Alewijn, close to where older gates had guarded the road to Haarlem since the seventeenth century. It was built for a royal entrance: King William the Second rode in through it in 1840 to be inaugurated, and the gate was officially named the Willemspoort in his honour. Amsterdammers, who have never liked being told what to call things, ignored the official name almost at once.

So what was a gate for, in the age of steam? Mostly money. The city taxed goods coming in, grain, peat, meat, and a gate like this was a customs post dressed up as a monument. Beside it ran the Haarlemmertrekvaart, dug in the early 1630s, the first Dutch canal built for passenger barges pulled by horses. You bought a ticket, sat in the cabin, and a horse on the towpath hauled you to Haarlem on a timetable so reliable that people planned their days around it. Some historians like to call it one of the first scheduled public transport services in Europe.

Take a good look at all this classical order: the columns, the triangular pediment, the calm symmetry, the stone pretending to be eternal. Keep that picture in your head, because this walk is about the rebellion against it. Less than a century after this gate, a young architect from a poor Jewish family would build homes for dockworkers barely a kilometre north-west of here that look like nothing else on earth... rippling walls, brick that curves like fabric, a tower with no purpose except joy.

Today the gate holds apartments, and bicycles flow around it rather than through it. Walk west from the square, cross the water, and let the trees of the Westerpark swallow you.
2. Westerpark

Westerpark, Haarlemmerweg, 1014 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Follow the path along the pond and listen: somewhere beyond the trees on your right, a train is almost certainly rumbling past. That sound has been part of this place for longer than the park itself.

The railway embankment to the north carries the descendant of the very first railway in the Netherlands. On the twentieth of September 1839 a train pulled by a locomotive called De Arend, the Eagle, ran from Haarlem to Amsterdam. Its Amsterdam terminus stood just outside the gate you have just seen, and it was called Willemspoort station. Imagine the crowds on the dike, half thrilled and half sure the passengers would suffocate at such speed.

The park came later, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it came out of necessity. Under the city's expansion plan of 1877, drawn up by the engineer Jan Kalff, Amsterdam burst out beyond its canals for the first time in two hundred years. Much of what was built was speculative and shoddy, thrown up fast for profit. Amsterdammers had a sour name for it: revolutiebouw, revolution building, not because of politics but because it went up at revolutionary speed. Families crammed into damp rooms, sometimes in basements below the water line. A park was the least the city could offer the people of these new districts.

And here is the twist that sets up everything you will see next. Disgust at those slums led to the Housing Act of 1901, the Woningwet, which allowed councils and non-profit housing associations to build decent homes for working people with public money. It took a few years, and the First World War, before the money flowed. But when it did, it landed in the hands of a group of young architects who believed a worker deserved beauty as much as a banker.

Keep heading west through the park, towards the long red brick halls rising beyond the trees. Ahead is a factory that once lit the whole city.
3. Westergasfabriek

Pazzanistraat 37, 1014 DB Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk between the red brick halls with their stepped gables and stone trim, and ask yourself what you would guess these buildings were if nobody told you. A country house? A town hall? A rather grand school? They were built to make gas out of coal, in clouds of soot, around the clock.

The Westergasfabriek was built in the early 1880s by an English company, the Imperial Continental Gas Association, which supplied gas to cities across Europe. Its architect, Isaac Gosschalk, dressed the whole factory in the style of the Dutch Renaissance, with decorative brick, gables and little towers. Industrial buildings were expected to be ugly, so why bother? Partly pride, partly diplomacy... a works that looked like a manor was easier for the neighbours to swallow.

For decades this place lit Amsterdam. Coal arrived, was baked in retorts until it gave up its gas, and the gas was stored in enormous round holders before flowing through pipes under the streets to lamps, stoves and factories. Look for the great drum-shaped building at the far end: that was a gasholder, and today it is one of the most atmospheric event halls in the city, round as a coliseum.

Then natural gas was discovered in the province of Groningen in 1959, and within a few years coal gas was obsolete. Production here stopped in the 1960s, and the factory left behind a terrible gift: ground saturated with tar and chemical residues. For years nobody quite knew what to do with a beautiful, poisoned site.

The answer was a park. Designed by the American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson and opened in the early 2000s, it turns the old industrial grid into lawns, water and paths, with the listed buildings reused as cinemas, studios and restaurants. It became a model for turning old industrial land into public space. Now head north-east, under the railway, into the neighbourhood where Amsterdam's most daring housing was born.
4. Spaarndammerplantsoen

Spaarndammerplantsoen, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stand in the middle of the little park and turn slowly, all the way round. On three sides the brick walls do things brick is not supposed to do: they bulge, they ripple, they step forward and back, and the windows are cut into dozens of tiny panes like a ship's cabin.

All three blocks around this square were designed by one man, Michel de Klerk. He was born in 1884 into a poor Jewish family in Amsterdam, the youngest of a very large brood, and he left school early to work as a draughtsman in the office of the architect Eduard Cuypers. No university, no grand tour of Italy. Just an extraordinary hand and a head full of ships, farmhouses and Scandinavian brickwork.

The first block, on the south side, was begun in 1913 for a private builder, Klaas Hille. Hille was a businessman, not a reformer, but he gave de Klerk astonishing freedom, and the young architect used it to the last brick. Look at how the courses change direction, how some bricks stand upright, how a roof drops low like a thatched farmhouse and then a corner shoots upward. The second block followed, and then the third, the most famous of all, which you will see in a moment.

Critics needed a name for this new style, and in 1916 the architect Jan Gratama gave it one: the Amsterdam School. It was never a school with classrooms. It was a loose band of young designers, de Klerk, Piet Kramer and others, who believed that housing for dockworkers and their families should be as expressive as a cathedral. Their opponents thought it wasteful and theatrical. Their admirers saw it as social idealism made out of clay.

The sad part is how short the story was. De Klerk died in 1923, only thirty-nine years old, and many of his ideas died with him as the style grew tamer. Walk to the pointed end of the block to the north-west, where a strange tower rises over the rooftops.
5. Het Schip

Oostzaanstraat 45, 1013 WG Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk towards the narrow point of the building and look at it from a little distance, the way you would look at a ship's bow coming into harbour. That is exactly what the neighbours saw, and that is why everybody has called it Het Schip, the Ship, from the start.

It was built between 1917 and 1920 for the workers' housing association Eigen Haard, which means Own Hearth. The block is a long triangle of 102 homes, with a post office at the sharp end and a small meeting hall for the tenants. De Klerk even wrapped his walls around an older school that already stood on the site, folding it into the composition rather than knocking it down.

Now look at the tower. It holds no bells, no water tank, no stairs worth climbing. It is there purely to give the neighbourhood a landmark, a spire for people who had never had one of their own. Below it, look for the details: the bulging window frames, the lettering, the brick laid in waves, the little front doors each slightly different. Many of the new homes had their own toilet, a luxury most of the tenants' parents had never known.

Not everyone was charmed. Some councillors grumbled that such ornament was a waste of public money, and some architects of the rising modern movement thought it sentimental. But the socialist alderman Floor Wibaut and his allies backed this kind of building, and the tenants were proud of it. People called these blocks workers' palaces, and they meant it without irony.

The former post office is now Museum Het Schip, devoted to the Amsterdam School, and if you step inside you can see the post office interior restored to de Klerk's design. Every lamp and letter seems to have been drawn by hand. When you are ready, continue a short way north to a quiet gateway that leads into a completely different idea of how workers should live.
6. Zaanhof

Zaanhof, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Step through the gateway and the noise of the city drops away. You are standing in a broad green courtyard ringed by low houses with steep roofs, like a village square that someone has carefully lifted and set down inside a city block.

The Zaanhof was built around the end of the First World War, at almost the same moment as Het Schip, just a few steps away. Yet it speaks a completely different language. Where de Klerk's walls ripple and shout, these houses are calm, symmetrical and almost rural. Two ideas of the good life for working people, built side by side: the expressive city of brick, and the garden village where children play safely on the grass inside the walls.

The garden village idea came from England, from reformers who believed that light, air and a bit of green could cure the misery of industrial cities. In Amsterdam land was too precious for real garden suburbs, so architects did the next best thing. They turned the block inside out, put the village in the middle and let the outer walls keep the street at bay.

Notice the street names on your way in and out: Zaanstraat, Oostzaanstraat, Zaandammerplein, Wormerveerstraat, Assendelftstraat, Knollendamstraat. Almost every street in this quarter is named after a town or village along the river Zaan, just north of Amsterdam. In the seventeenth century that was one of the busiest industrial landscapes in Europe, with hundreds of windmills sawing timber and grinding everything from mustard to paint. It was in Zaandam, in 1697, that the young Russian tsar Peter the Great came to learn shipbuilding in person, working with the carpenters.

Sit on a bench for a moment and you will understand why people who grow up here rarely want to leave. Then go back out through the gate and walk east along Zaandammerplein to Spaarndammerstraat, the old spine of the whole neighbourhood.
7. Spaarndammerstraat

Spaarndammerstraat, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stop on Spaarndammerstraat and look down its length, at the bakeries, the shopfronts and the brick corners with their Amsterdam School flourishes. It feels like a perfectly ordinary high street. But the line it follows is far older than anything built on it.

The name comes from the Spaarndammerdijk, the dike that carried the road from Amsterdam towards the village of Spaarndam, near Haarlem. For centuries the IJ, to the north of here, was not a calm canal but an open arm of the Zuiderzee, tidal and stormy. Dikes like this one were what stood between the city's western edge and the water. If you notice side streets sitting a little lower than the main road, that is the ghost of the dike talking.

Everything changed in 1876, when the North Sea Canal opened, with great locks at IJmuiden. Suddenly Amsterdam had a direct route to the sea, and the water levels behind the locks could be controlled. New harbours were dug, the land between the railway and the water filled up with industry, and the old dike became just a street. In the 1910s and 1920s, homes for the dockers, timber workers and railwaymen rose on both sides of it.

The result was a neighbourhood sealed in like an island, with the railway to the south and the harbours to the north. That isolation made the Spaarndammerbuurt famously close-knit, a place where people knew whose child was whose and where the corner shop was the news agency. It also made it poor, and for long stretches of the twentieth century, forgotten by the rest of the city.

Look up at the corners as you walk. Many of the blocks along here were built by the same generation of architects who worked with de Klerk, and you will catch rounded balconies, brick lettering and windows that look like portholes. Follow the street north towards the water, and turn right for the old timber harbours, where a tower stands on a strange stilted bridge.
8. Houthavens & Pontsteiger

Pontsteiger, 1014 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk to the edge of the water and look up at the tower that seems to be carrying a bridge on its shoulders: a slab of apartments lifted high above the ground and balanced across two legs. That is the Pontsteiger, named after the old ferry pier, and it is the newest chapter of this whole walk.

The water in front of you is the Houthavens, the timber harbours, dug in the 1870s as the North Sea Canal opened Amsterdam to the sea again. Wood was the raw material of everything, houses, ships, furniture, pilings, and it came by the shipload from Scandinavia and the Baltic. Logs lay floating in the basins, stacked on the quays, sawn and stored in the yards behind. The men who handled them lived in the Spaarndammerbuurt you have just walked through.

Have a look at the street signs on the new islands around you. One of them is called Libau-eiland, after Libau, the old German name for the Latvian port of Liepaja. It is a name that points straight across the Baltic, back along the routes the timber travelled.

After the Second World War the port moved west, ships grew too big, and the timber trade drifted away. By the end of the century the Houthavens had become a half-empty edge of the city, all sheds, fences and open water. Then, from the 2010s, a new district began to rise here, built on the old piers and on islands, with homes, schools and a waterfront path.

Architecturally this is a fascinating place to compare with Het Schip. A hundred years apart, both answer the same question: how do you build a home that makes people proud of where they live? De Klerk used brick, craft and ornament. The Pontsteiger uses height, steel, glass and a view of the whole IJ. Walk east along the water now, towards the long colourful block standing on stilts at the end of the old pier.
9. Silodam

Silodam, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk out along the old pier until the long block on stilts stands in front of you, its facade a patchwork of colours and materials, like a ship stacked high with mismatched containers. Water laps under your feet, because this building stands not on land but on piles in the IJ.

This is Silodam, completed in the early 2000s by the Rotterdam architects MVRDV. The idea was cheeky and brilliant: instead of one type of flat repeated a hundred times, they mixed many different apartment types, large and small, high and low, and let each group show itself on the outside with its own colour and material. The building literally tells you who lives where. It is ten storeys of neighbours, stacked rather than lined up along a street.

Now turn to the solid old brick giant at the landward end. That is the grain silo that gave the pier its name, built at the end of the nineteenth century, when grain from abroad was unloaded here and stored before it went to the mills and bakeries. Next to Silodam it looks like a grandfather standing beside a grandchild in a striped jumper. After the grain trade left, it stood empty for years and was eventually converted into apartments too.

This pair is the third answer of the walk to the same housing question. In the 1910s, the state funded brick palaces for workers. Around 2000, Amsterdam was building on its abandoned harbours, and architects were experimenting with density, variety and water. Same city, same problem of too many people and too little land, completely different moods.

If the sun is out, stand still and look west down the IJ towards the harbour cranes. This view of open water and big ships is the reason Amsterdam exists at all. Now walk back along the pier and head south-west to the first of the Western Islands and its old waterfront called the Zandhoek.
10. Zandhoek, Realeneiland

Zandhoek, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk slowly along the cobbles and look at the row of old houses facing the water: narrow brick fronts, wooden shutters, gables in a line like soldiers on parade, and boats moored right below the front steps. You have just stepped back almost four hundred years.

This is the Zandhoek, the Sand Corner, on the island called Realeneiland. The Western Islands were made in the early 1600s, when Amsterdam was booming and needed space for its most dangerous and smelly trades: shipyards, tar boilers, rope walks, warehouses. Better to keep the fire risk outside the city walls, out here on the IJ. This island is named after the Reael family, merchants who owned the land.

And the sand? Empty ships returning to sea needed weight in their holds, or they would roll over in the first strong wind. So here, on this quay, sand was sold as ballast, measured and loaded by the shipful. Sand was big business in a country where every new street, every new island had to be raised above the water first.

Look for the house called De Gouden Reael, the Golden Reael, with its name stone on the facade. In 1940 the Amsterdam writer Jan Mens published a novel with that title, set right here on the Zandhoek, and it made this forgotten corner famous across the country. In the twentieth century these houses were close to collapse. That they still stand is thanks to restorers who saw value where others saw slums.

At the end of the quay you will see a white wooden drawbridge, the Drieharingenbrug, the Three Herrings Bridge, connecting this island with Prinseneiland. With the gabled houses behind it and the boats below, it is one of the loveliest corners of the whole of western Amsterdam. Cross it, wander past the warehouses of Prinseneiland, and follow the water east to the last island, Bickerseiland.
11. Bickerseiland

Bickersgracht, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Walk along the Bickersgracht and look at the mix around you: old warehouses with hoist beams and shuttered loading doors, houseboats, and blocks of later housing that try, politely, to fit in. This is Bickerseiland, the last stop of the walk, and maybe the most unexpected.

The island takes its name from Jan Bicker, a wealthy shipbuilder and merchant who bought it in 1631 and filled it with shipyards and warehouses. He belonged to one of the most powerful families in the Dutch Republic. His brothers sat in the city government, and his brother Andries Bicker was one of Amsterdam's burgomasters.

Now here is the delicious irony of the Western Islands. The island you have just crossed is Prinseneiland, the Island of the Princes, named after the House of Orange. And in 1650 the Bickers and the Prince of Orange were bitter enemies. The young stadtholder William the Second tried to bring the proud, independent city to heel and sent troops to march on Amsterdam. The Bickers were forced out of the city government. A few months later William died of smallpox, and Amsterdam went back to doing as it pleased. Today the Prince's island and the Bickers' island lie side by side, a short stroll apart.

In the twentieth century the shipyards closed, and parts of the island fell into ruin. When new housing came in the late twentieth century, it was deliberately kept low, and you can see the compromise all around you: modern homes with gables and brick that try not to outgrow the warehouses.

So think back over your walk. A neoclassical gate, a gasworks pretending to be a manor, de Klerk's rippling palaces for workers, a garden village, a tower on a bridge, a block of stacked containers, and now these quiet seventeenth-century quays. Every one of them is Amsterdam arguing with itself about how people should live. The Haarlemmerdijk and Central Station are a short walk to the south-east, and the argument goes on.