Amsterdam School

The Amsterdam School is a Dutch expressionist architectural movement centered in Amsterdam and most active from roughly 1910 to the early 1930s, closely associated with the architects Michel de Klerk, Piet Kramer and Johan van der Mey. Its buildings are constructed chiefly in brick, worked into elaborate sculptural patterns, curved surfaces and rhythmic decorative brickwork combined with wrought iron detailing, applying an Expressionist sensibility for organic, emotive form to an otherwise conventional masonry construction system. The movement's foundational building is the Scheepvaarthuis, or Shipping House, designed by Johan van der Mey and completed in 1916 as offices for a group of Dutch shipping companies, generally regarded as the first true Amsterdam School building for the way its sculpted brick exterior and integrated decorative sculpture announced the style. The movement is equally well known for the large scale public housing estates its architects designed for the city of Amsterdam in the 1910s and 1920s, including Michel de Klerk's Het Schip complex, which applied the same expressive brick vocabulary to ordinary working class housing blocks rather than to grand civic or commercial buildings alone.