Archives

I guess the subject of archives isn't necessarily the most exciting, but they can be fun. Today I went to have a look at the new Amsterdam city archive. The archive used to be in a lovely old building on the Amstel, but not quite in the centre of the city. The building used to be the town hall of one of the villages annexed by Amsterdam some time ago. The new building is in the centre of town, in a huge building that used to be the headquarters of one of the country's biggest banks. It was built in the twenties, a huge, dark closed block. It was always something of a fortress, a place in the town centre that was completely inaccessible. And now suddenly, it is open to the public. And you can see that the designers have managed to combine the grandeur of the old bank with the lightness of modern architecture and the demands made by the public.



On the outside the building looks like a huge vault that you cannot easily enter. When it was still a bank that was probably the case. Now it has been opened up a little and there are some windows on the ground floor, which allows you to look in, but which also allows you to look out into the busy street when you are inside.



I guess the real surprise is the inside, where you have high openings and glass ceilings between the different sections of the building, covered by glass roofs, which allow a lot of light in and which open up the building. The inside is modern, light and straightforward, but a lot of the details tell you about the history of the place.



I had a tour of the building some time last year, when the work was still in progress, and had a look round some of the board rooms on the upper floors. Beautiful big rooms, now once again filled with the old furniture. At the time they were still being renovated, and now they are no longer open to the public, so I can only imagine what they look like from the pictures up on the website.



The vaults are accessible and they probably give the best sense of the old building. The doors are massive, but the vault itself is beautifully decorated, with lots of smaller strong rooms leading off it. Many of the details were left intact and can be closely studied. The panel with all the technical controls is off to the side, all the small safety deposit boxes are stacked in the corridors and the smaller rooms. You can just imagine people over the years coming in to deposit or take out their valuables. The sense of history remains here.