Hendrick Petrus Berlage's villas

Hendrick Berlage is known to architectural history mainly for his Amsterdam Stock Exchange of 1903. This is often celebrated as a proto-modernist work in a rationalist spirit, an oversimplified view, for the building had a conventionally eclectic start and was the fruit of long struggle and many revisions. The development of Berlage's architectural ideas during the period of its gestation is chronicled in a fascinating way by a series of private villas built for friends who were artists and intellectuals. Completed year by year, they run right through the 1890s, showing Berlage's changing concerns with the articulation of content, the expression of construction, the application of controlling geometry, and the development of architectural space.