A different view of Amsterdam

01 June 2018

French architect brings the city into focus

On 15 June Museum Het Grachtenhuis opens the exhibition ‘Amsterdam: Another Look’ in which the famous French architect Marcel Bajard takes the public on a journey through the city on the basis of his drawings, prints and maps. He shows how the originality and beauty of Amsterdam are not the result of a lucky coincidence, but of developments and artistic movements that over the years have shaped the canals, the streets, and the public space. The exhibition can be visited through Saturday, July 29, 2018.

The works in the exhibition show how much Amsterdam has been shaped by water, and how attached Amsterdammers are to the close relationship between home and water. City planners and architects in the city today continue to use water to shape the city.

Under the spell of Amsterdam
Marcel Bajard (b. 1941) is a renowned French architect and urban planner from Grenoble. He is co-founder and former director of the ‘Etudes Urbaines’ department within the famous multidisciplinary agency AREP, which realizes urban planning projects from Cairo to Beijing and from Bahrain to Versailles. AREP specializes in the construction of high-quality infrastructure, stations, airports; Bajard previously published the book ‘From the station to the city’ on this subject with François Lamarre. During his walks through Amsterdam he drew and analyzed the space for his book about the city: ‘Amsterdam – Une autre façon de voir la ville à travers son urbanisme.’

Drawing Marcel Bajard: houses built along the canals from the 17th century

New visions of the ring of canals
Museum Het Grachtenhuis is the place where the story of the canals is told in an accessible and approachable way. In the permanent multimedia exhibition, tens of thousands of visitors every year are introduced to one of the most spectacular urban expansions in the world: the seventeenth-century ring of canals in Amsterdam. This ring of canals is a cluster of these special values, qualities, stories and studies, and is therefore constantly evolving; Museum Het Grachtenhuis sees it as its task to present new and different visions of this area.

Practical information
The exhibition ‘Amsterdam: a different view’ can be visited from Friday 15 June until Saturday 29 July 2018 at Museum Het Grachtenhuis, Herengracht 386, 1016CJ Amsterdam. The exhibition is co-sponsored by l’Echappée Belle, ‘Une fondation pour la promotion de la culture française aux Pays-Bas’, www.echappeebelle.nl, and the bookstore Le Temps Retrouvé, www.letempsretrouve.nl.

Drawing Marcel Bajard: new building in the Oosterdok