1 Intro

Little is known about Eduard Cuypers (1859-1927) and Marius Hulswit (1862-1921). Their buildings became famous when fi rst built. After their deaths followed a period in which their works were shunned in the Netherlands. After the Second World War their work area of the Dutch East Indies (now: Indonesia) disappeared for the Dutch. Cuypers and Hulswit worked on the development of a colony that had to be ‘western’.

Marius Hulswit learned the trade on the building site of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He left for the Dutch East Indies in 1884, where he began to work with a contractor, only to return to the Netherlands shortly afterwards, because of the pregnancy of his future wife. In 1893 he travelled with his wife and child back to the colony to settle there, but now permanently. There he was a master at the construction site in improvising, arranging and mediating. This was useful in a country where the construction projects were sometimes far apart. Hulswit spoke the language of the laborers whom he himself trained. He built his fi rst project in the Dutch East Indies in 1895. A few years later he completed the cathedral of Batavia, later called Jakarta. Only then did buildings follow to his own design. This book is about him and about his collaboration with Eduard Cuypers. In 1908, as an architect with a considerable track record, he made his fi rst design for the Dutch East Indies. His offi ce had already completed more than sixty projects in the Netherlands. His fl uency and the surprising variety in his work brought him to the forefront in the world of Dutch architecture. His designs were sparkling, fresh and original, which was partly thanks to his talented employees with whom he worked, without dogmas, both traditional and early modern. His fi rm followed the latest international trends in architecture, applied the latest techniques and always developed its plans in close consultation with the client. For Eduard Cuypers, an architecture fi rm was fi rst and foremost a company that had to make something beautiful for the client and thus provided work for him and his employees. However, he noticed the group of dissenting architects growing around him. He heard that they called him commercial and noticed that each and every one of them strove for originality, glorifi ed each other as artists and sporadically fi nished a structure. He openly reproached them for a ‘pathetic craving for originality’. Stimulated by the Dutch architect H.P. Berlage (1856-1934) this group grew continuously in size and infl uence. Berlage and his followers wanted to close the door on the past, not only politically but also with what emerged from the nineteenth century, what they called ‘the age of ugliness’. The Dutch standard work on building styles, published by E. Gugel (1832- 1905), a lecturer at Delft University of Technology was regularly copied until 1918, which was the last time extensive attention was paid to the nineteenth century. In the book Eduard Cuypers was still regarded as ‘one of the fi rst architects to accept modern views’. There were no reprints after 1918. Architects, such as he, were boycotted in the history of Dutch architecture, as was their approach to design. Cuypers felt this coming. He picked up utilitarian projects in the Netherlands which were less aff ected by control of a building’s external appearance. He shifted his fi eld of work to the Dutch East Indies, to build together with Hulswit and later Fermont. This work may not have been appreciated in the Netherlands, but internationally, it was. The scathing verdict of Berlage on two buildings by Cuypers and Hulswit in the Indies confi rmed his premonition. In the Netherlands, people learned to observe architecture in a ‘rational way’. The individual who immersed himself in the pre-war western architecture in the Dutch East Indies followed Berlage’s dismissive opinion about the work of Eduard Cuypers and Hulswit-Fermont, even without their oeuvre having been mapped.

In Indonesia many of their buildings are still fantastic. Some are literally in the spotlight. Young Indonesians take selfi es in front of them. Is this because they have learned to look at architecture diff erently? Consider the former Javasche Bank (now: Museum Bank Indonesia) or Hulswit’s neo-Gothic cathedral with the two brightly lit cast-iron spires towering radiantly above a city. This city grew into a city of millions. Who has any idea of where the Netherlands is and its infl uence on architecture? It seems as if all the shameful words that were once uttered concerning the work of Eduard Cuypers are silenced in the sounds of this metropolis.

The Indonesian archipelago, superimposed on the map of Europe colijn 1911, p.1