Het Plan Zuid in woorden : Veranderende stedebouwkundige begrippen en een onbekende plankaart

Abstract

Looking at H.P. Berlage’s famous Plan Zuid (‘South Plan’) for Amsterdam by examining the notions that were used and are still being used to describe his design, we gain new insights into the design, into the notions themselves and into the way in which historic plans and their explanations are to be seen in their interrelatedness. From studying Berlage’s Explanatory Memorandum it immediately becomes clear that the well-known plan that is usually depicted does not reflect the original design. In this presentation map of the Office of Public Works from 1917 the emphasis is on uniform buildings, leaving the public space in a unelaborated state. The original plan from March 1915 has a different focus with more attention to a detailed public space, including street profiles and directives for special buildings in special places. This plan is also more in line with the accompanying bird’s-eye views and with Berlage’s own writings on urbanism. By looking at the designed phenomena of the original plan (the referents), all of the notions from Berlage’s Explanatory Memorandum have been examined, divided into three categories: public spaces, buildings and the city and its elements. Notions used by contemporaries were also looked at (synchronic) and a comparison was made with the present (diachronic). Berlage’s design was based on a hierarchical street network, which he developed in profiles with different spatial characteristics defined at four levels: ’(breede) verkeersweg’/‘(broad) traffic road’, ‘straalvormige hoofdstraat’/‘radial main street’, ‘ringvormige hoofdstraat’/‘concentric main street’ and ‘woonstraat’/‘domestic street’. The most conspicuous of these are the 60 m wide ‘verkeerswegen’/‘traffic roads’ or ‘Parkwegen’/’Parkways’, which were already also called ‘boulevards’ or ‘lanen’/‘avenues’ at the time. The notions of ‘weg’/‘road’ and ‘straat’/‘street’ were almost interchangeable in practice, as it turned out. For his few urban waterways Berlage consistently used the word ‘gracht’/‘canal’— which at the time was less associated with the urban profile—even though his contemporaries also used the more neutral word ‘kanaal’/’waterway’. The remaining public spaces, such as ‘park’ and ‘plein’/’square’ were less important and also less interesting as notions. The housing consisted of three classes: ‘eengezinshuizen›/ ‘single family houses’, ‹tweegezinshuizen›/’two family houses’ and ‹volksklassehuizen›/ ’working class houses’. In the latter two categories one ‘huis’/‘house’ contained several ‘woningen’/‘apartments’. Various synonyms were used for these notions. By contrast, the many public buildings were designated in more unequivocal terms. Berlage also included ‘bijzondere bebouwing’/ ‘special buildings’ with ‘a certain monumentality’ and he argued in favour of ‘blokbouw’/’block building’, a notion that could refer to ‘building in closed blocks’, but especially to ‘building in large architectural units’. As to the city elements it is interesting to note that in Berlage’s day the words ‘wijk’/’quarter’ and ‘buurt’/’neighbourhood’ were synonyms, whereas nowadays they indicate a difference in scale, possibly under the influence of modernist urbanism. The research into Plan Zuid has demonstrated that notions are always in flux. In terms of synchrony especially the partly overlapping notions are interesting, as are those notions about which there is no consensus yet. In terms of diachrony especially those notions stand out in which an almost imperceptible change in meaning has occurred. Those notions in particular have led to the general conclusion that in studying historic explanations of plans one must always consciously look at the contemporary meaning and the referents of the words that are used, if one is to interpret them correctly.