Beschrijving
Wonderful, the Stedelijk Museum has reopened and I can finally wander round
again the way I used to. The Van Gogh museum as a building never much appealed to me, even though I adored the paintings from his ‘French period’. I soon avoided the Rijksmuseum because of Cuypers’ heavyhanded architecture. The stifled building renovated as a kind of crypt was never much
fun to be in. No, I visited the Stedelijk every weekend as an adolescent with my national museum subscription card. It was not necessarily the tendency to study the meaning or technique of art that made me happy, but actually just the act of looking, feeling it and then imitating it at home. The postcard I bought of my favourite painting by Willem de Kooning – Rosy fingered dawn
at Louise Point – is still in my possession. Imitating and then improving never came easily to me, so I became an architect instead.
Still, art is, due to its autonomous nature, a great source of inspiration to many architects. So much freedom, daring and expression. How to implement
these in our highly determined work. I witnessed the renovation in the P.L. Takstraat in Amsterdam by De Klerk and Kramer at close quarters. I saw the way in which architecture and art formed a whole through the cooperation between the architects and sculptor Hildo Krop. The lead cockerel symbolising the dawn of housing association De Dageraad (Daybreak), is an artwork
in itself and partly emphasises the craftsmanship with which the buildings were realised.
