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AT THE OFFICES OF THE ARCHITECTURE FIRM IN AMSTERDAM & JAKARTA
Eduard Cuypers: young and promising Amsterdam: 1872-1878: From Roermond to Amsterdam
Born in Roermond in the southern part of the Netherlands on April 18, 1859, Eduard Cuypers completed his schooling in 1875.1 When not at school he was a regular visitor at the workshop of his uncle P.J.H. (Pierre) Cuypers (1827-1921). Although his uncle moved to Amsterdam in 1865, he kept his workshop in Roermond for the production and restoration of church sculptures. Pierre Cuypers had steady work and took on an average of fifteen new construction projects annually, especially in Germany. He travelled back and forth a lot between Amsterdam and Roermond and frequently visited his clients, to monitor progress on the construction site. From 1874 onwards, Pierre Cuypers worked annually on more than fifteen new churches, mainly in the Netherlands. He designed in neo-gothic style, his signature style. A year later Pierre Cuypers received two important assignments in Amsterdam: Central Station and the Rijksmuseum. Pierre owed these secular building projects to his brother-in-law, Joseph Alberdingk Thijm and his friend and government advisor Victor de Stuers. Both used their favourite neo-Gothic exclusively. They regarded it as the only answer to classicism and other imitations, and they would also like to find this architecture in government buildings. For fear that those buildings would become too neo-gothic, read too Catholic, many architects opposed these assignments. Young Eduard must have noticed that opinions about architecture can be quite divided. Differing opinions also came to the forefront in the Architectura et Amicitia Society (A et A) in Amsterdam, where P.J.H. Cuypers was an honorary member. Eduard Cuypers moved with his parents and three sisters to Amsterdam in 1876, where he could follow his uncle closely. He must have identified less with the world view of his uncle, grafted on the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages. He was for renewal. On January 13, 1877, the first of 8,000 poles went into the ground for the Rijksmuseum. To allay fears that it would become a typical Catholic building, Pierre Cuypers chose to use sculptures and ornaments from Dutch history. He set up
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a workshop for this purpose in a shed on the construction site. Pierre needed, as he said, ‘young people who are going to carry out the decorations on the building, in the first place sculptors’. Eduard also went to work there and had to work strenuously, as he said later. He could not sculpt himself, but made sketches, drawings and building plans, that appealed to him, as did the organisation around it. It is possible that he met Marius Hulswit on the construction site, who was then the 15-year-old son of an Amsterdam apothecary.2 Eduard observed the building process. He may have been involved in the discussions about the most ideal light in the museum, because he later devoted much attention to light in his designs.3 He set aside part of his earned money to set up his own architecture firm Eduard, unlike his uncle, was open to the latest developments in architecture. 4 For that reason, he spent a great deal of money on books and international journals in the field of architecture.5 In 1878 he became a member of the architects’ association Architectura et Amicitia (A et A). His uncle may have recommended his young cousin. Perhaps Eduard travelled to Paris that year to get inspiration at the World’s Fair, but also to see a city that must have fascinated him. Paris was a city full of new construction in the style of the French Renaissance and classicism. Amsterdam 1879-1884: ‘Family is family’
In 1879 Eduard worked on the construction of the first American Hotel in Amsterdam, the predecessor of the present one. His father also contributed to this as a decorative painter, by applying the coats of arms of the various American states on the ceilings. In 1879, Pierre Cuypers’ workshop on the building site of the Rijksmuseum was formally converted into the drawing school for art crafts ‘Kunst-Nijverheid-Teekenschool Quellinus’. Here Eduard followed an architectural training. Hereby he obtained access to the necessary papers to start his own architecture firm. In 1881 he began working as a small independent entrepreneur using the name Ed. Cuypers, in order to avoid confusion with the office of his uncle Pierre. He designed a representative façade for the Rondeel Hotel in Amsterdam. ‘The façades were erected in the style of the new
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