Museumplein: From Space to Place Users, roles of key partners, relations with surrounding areas, history The Museum Quarter is a unique location in Amsterdam: it comprises five world-class cultural institutions: the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Van Gogh Museum, Concertgebouw and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. For the people of Amsterdam, the best works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Rietveld, as well as concerts by Bach, Händel or Liszt in one of the world's best concert halls, are just around the corner. In the immediate vicinity are the Vondel Park, P.C. Hooft Street (the most up-market shopping street in the Netherlands), Van Baerle Street, the Spiegel Quarter (specializing in antiquities, linked to the Rijksmuseum function) and the northern section of the Pijp district (the ‘Quartier Latin’ of Amsterdam, where Amsterdammers themselves go out nowadays). However, these areas are not linked, the user groups are very separated, and the Museumplein lacks identity. Let’s take a closer look.
1. The cultural institutions Van Gogh, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, Concertgebouw The cultural institutions at the Museumplein attract an annual audience of around 3.5m visitors: 1.5m at the Van Gogh Museum, an estimated 1.2m at the Rijksmuseum (just re-opened, so this is an estimate), 0.5m at the Stedelijk Museum (just re-opened) and 0.8m at the Concertgebouw. Visitors at the Van Gogh and Rijksmuseum are mostly (80%) foreign visitors (UK, France, Italy, Spain and the US). Van Gogh is more or less at the top of its capacity; visitor numbers to the Rijksmuseum are expected to increase. The Rijksmuseum is trying to enhance its home market. Visitor numbers for the Rijksmuseum are expected to increase by 2m. Stedelijk Museum and Concertgebouw attract more of a domestic audience; the Stedelijk nationally, Concertgebouw regionally. They would both like more international visitors. Stedelijk has a target to attract more visitors, but is very limited in its budget to acquire new art works. Concertgebouw is dealing with a greying audience and, although specialists say the building is among the top 3 acoustic qualities in the world, does not have an international profile like, for instance, the Opera in Vienna. Some years ago, the Museumplein had the character of a “back yard”. The pedestrian flows have shifted from the outside streets of the Museumplein towards the inside, drastically changing the significance of the Museumplein from a “back yard” to a “common”. Stedelijk has been rebuilt and has moved the entrance to the inside of the Museumplein and has a new cafe and terrace that people can attend without a ticket. The restructured Rijksmuseum is more oriented towards the Museumplein and is planning to develop a restaurant still at the Museumplein side. Van Gogh will restructure in the next years, moving its main entrance to the Museumplein side.
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Combined, the Museums and the Concertgebouw are the largest tourist attraction in The Netherlands. However, they are not perceived as a combined entity. Since a couple of years, the institutions have more intensive talks about collaboration. The total number of visitors is expected to increase as cultural tourism grows and the Museums will make an effort to “earn back” their recent investments. Programming efforts are not working The City and District Zuid (South) invited the cultural institutions to bring forth plans for programming the Museumplein, to some degree inspired by other international cultural clusters such as the Museumsquartier in Vienna (with daily outdoor cultural programmes), Exhibition Road in London (with a joint organisation of the leading museums), and the Millennium Park in Chicago (the outdoor art and placemaking). However, the cultural institutions have not managed to come up with a plan so far, being focussed more on their recent building projects and recent national budget cuts in culture due to the crisis; and moreover being more focussed on what is happening inside their buildings. The city nor the district feel they should or can play the leading role in programming the Museumplein. This amounts in a passive situation.
2. Other functions at the Museumplein Tourist attractions Also present at the Museumplein are Coster Diamonds (mostly foreign tourists from buses and boat tours who are given a tour around the ‘diamond museum’ with the idea of selling afterwards) and the Bols Experience (promoting the Dutch liquor Jevener). Furthermore, there are some kiosks selling fast food, souvenirs and beverages, and the Cobra Cafe, which is mostly visited by tourists. The cafe owner complains he is too much on his own. There is not enough critical mass for him to stay open at night, and he would like more quality cafes and restaurants around him. The kiosk owners shared with us that they are very busy in the summer, only busy during weekends in the spring and autumn, and only busy around Christmas and New Year’s (Amsterdam fireworks are an attraction) in the winter. This is an important reflection of seasonal tourist flows. Skate park & playground There is also a small skate park, attracting both youth from the area and the whole city, a small playground (well-used by families with children from the area), and the pond, a children’s attraction in the summer, becomes a fairly wellused ice skating rink in the winter. Grass and open space The grassy area of Museumplein is used in the summer for relaxing, by the elementary school students just to the west, and by the firemen of the near fire station to play football in the summer. People living near the square use it for their daily dog-walking. So the square has a function for people in the direct vicinity, however, most Amsterdammers from the rest of the city more or less ignore the Museumplein, considering it a tourist bubble, and also lacking amenities such as the teahouses at the Vondelpark. Many Amsterdammers cycle by the Museumplein—the cycle routes are important connections and
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are among the busiest cycling routes—but hardly ever consider the Museumplein a destination. This is strange, considering the need for good public space and the intensity of use in the nearby Vondelpark (see below). Demonstration space The Museumplein has a tradition of being the national square to gather for national demonstrations and protests. For the city of Amsterdam, it is one of the safest squares to conduct protests. This plays an important role for future designs and possibilities, as the square cannot have too many height differences in relation with crowd safety and crowd control. Large supermarket & parking garage There is an underground supermarket, combined with an underground parking. Both function well; the supermarket is considering an extension. Their entrance however does not combine well with the new Stedelijk entrance and the traffic situation for pedestrians and cyclists is very unsafe; one of the ideas (but expensive) is to move the entrance to both supermarket and parking to the south-east entrance of the Museumplein, then also enabling an extension of the supermarket (which is fragile due to underground water flows and the adjacent historic buildings). Surrounding office space The east side of the Museumplein is dead. Here, we find offices mostly, the most expensive office location in The Netherlands, which makes it hard to open up their ground floors for public functions. Among the offices are the American Consulate and Gazprom. In the future, more visitors are expected to come in from the east side, as the new north-south metro line will be opened in 2017.
3. The areas around the Museumplein Overall, the center milieu of the city of Amsterdam has been expanding from the traditional canal zone to more the whole of the area within the A20 Ring Road. Before, the Museumplein was considered the edge of the center, now it lies more and more in the heart of the center. The south side of the center is becoming increasingly important, with the South train station growing in numbers, the Zuidas being developed as the new international business zone (under the influence of Schiphol airport) and the new metro line connecting the south and the central station. Spiegelstraat: antique specialties The Spiegelstraat (right) connects the historic city centre and the Amsterdam Canals to the Museumplein, however interrupted by quite a busy Stadhouderskade (the main inner city connecting ring for cars). The Spiegelstraat itself specializes in selling antiquities. The shop owners have indicated that the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum is crucial for their turnover. Tourists visiting the historic centre see the Museumplein as an extension of the centre.
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Vondelpark: a park for all Amsterdammers The Vondelpark is the city’s busiest park and is becoming overcrowded. Park visits have drastically increased in the last ten years, to 13m visitors last year. On the first sunny day in 2012, the numbers went up so much that the police had to separate the groups. Visitors are mostly Amsterdammers, and half the visitors are the cyclists using the Vondelpark as an important linear connection in the Amsterdam network. Amsterdam is among the world’s top cycle cities; cycling is increasing even more to the point that routes are becoming too busy and bicycle parking is a hot topic. PC Hooftstraat: luxury shopping The PC Hooftstraat is the country’s most fancy fashion street, and is extending into Amsterdam Zuid slowly at the Van Baerlestraat and the Willemsparkweg into south. However, the street is no competition with fancy shopping areas in international terms (Paris, London, Milan). De Pijp: Amsterdam’s Latin Quarter De Pijp (right), a very mixed and high-density ‘Quartier Latin’, has become the most important area for wining/dining. However, the Museumplein and De Pijp are not well-connected for pedestrians. The new metro line is under construction at the central axis of De Pijp and is causing fragmentation of the streets and interruption in the pedestrian flows for more than ten years now. However, in 2017 this will change when the metro opens, and the streets above will be one of the crucial axes for pedestrians and cyclists again. The metro line itself is expected to become one of Europe’s busiest, pushing a daily 60,000 extra passengers into De Pijp. Important attractions in De Pijp are the Heineken Experience (650,000 visitors per year) and the Albert Cuyp market, the country’s most famous market with 6 mln visitors per year (25% foreign visitors). The District Zuid has a plan to improve the Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat as a pedestrian connection to the Museumplein, clearing most of the car parks and enabling more public functions on the ground floor in the zoning plan.
Museumplein, surrounded by Vondelpark, PC Hooftstraat (to the west), Historic center and connecting Spiegelstraat (to the north) and De Pijp and connecting Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat (to the east). The black striped line shows the new north-south metro line.
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4. History of the Museumplein For the Museumplein project (2006-08), a lot of research was done in the cultural history of the square. How did such a large square come into being at the end of the 19th Century, in a city of merchants that always builds where it can? 1880s: In the meadows The Rijksmuseum architect Cuyper was a very important person. Around 1880, the current Museumplein was where the city reached the meadows. For the first time since the Golden Century (when the canals were built), Amsterdam was booming again due to industrialisation, and it was clear that the city would expand towards the south with a lot of new residential areas. Cuyper noticed the new massive gymnastic events and the World Exhibitions in cities like Paris and London. Those cities had to clear space at a very high cost to enable these happenings. Cuypers managed to convince the Amsterdam politicians, who felt competitive with the other European capitals, to not build on the place now called the Museumplein. 1900s: For large-scale masses Before the War, the Museumplein was indeed used for mass gymnastics, large ice-skating rinks and several (commercial) World Expo’s. From the start, it was a bit more of an elite square, the area around it deliberately planned as a new villa area to retain the more wealthy citizens for Amsterdam. 1940s: Destroyed, rebuilt for cars During the War, much of the square was destroyed, being an important base for German forces. After the war, the city decided the Museumplein should be revitalised as a cultural quarter by opening it up to car traffic (the modernist idea on the Amsterdam scale). What was called the shortest highway of The Netherlands was opened. The remaining areas next to the road were designed by landscape architect Warner and used mostly as a museum garden for the Stedelijk Museum and green areas for the surrounding neighbourhoods.
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1970s: For protests In the seventies and the eighties, many national mass protests took place at the Museumplein, against cars murdering children on bikes (the start of the development of Amsterdam as the bicycle city it is nowadays) and against the cold war nuclear missiles being placed on Dutch territory. These are still deeply settled in the collective memory of the Dutch. 1990s: Given back to the people (with some mistakes) In the 90s, the city decided to cut the traffic connection out, creating a green space for pedestrians. Doubting between landscape architect Beth Gali (Barcelona) and Andersson (Denmark) they chose for the latter, assuming that he would better understand how to create a great place in the context of the Dutch climate. Andersson tried to connect the Concertgebouwplein and the Museumplein (which the city failed to implement) and introduced an idea of a democratic field. He tried to diminish the dominance of the cultural buildings, trying to hide the Stedelijk in a lifted green field, making the Rijksmuseum less important with the ‘light line’ (that never functioned) deliberately missing the central axis of the museum and pushing back the then new Kurukawa extension of the Van Gogh Museum to the side of the square (Van Gogh wanted to build their extension more in the centre of the square). The city and the District Zuid however had very little money available and many mistakes were made in placing trees where they cannot grow (above underground parking garages); a very poor drainage system (resulting in large pools in the rainy seasons); the grass being lower in the middle than the edges rather than the other way around, collecting all the water; the foot paths being too small; the bicycle paths forgotten by the Danish designer and then later added in illogical ways; the benches and other street furniture being of very low quality, not inviting for sitting and resting; the fountain totally failing and the north grain part killing the trees by taking the oxygin out of the soil. Museumplein project 2006-2008 A large part of the Museumplein project in 2006 and the attention since has gone into making small but significant improvements, trying to ‘fix’ a lot of these failures. A new drainage system, better grass and soil underneath it, widening foot paths, and most of all, a better and much more alert organization for the Museumplein’s maintenance. The Museumplein project 2006-2008 tried to introduce the idea of working on the software, the orgware AND the hardware (in stead of only the design and the hardware). It focussed on three areas: getting better maintenance and ‘fixing the bugs’ (of which a lot has been done since by the District Zuid), getting better programming (which did not get lift-off due to a lack of urgency both on the city’s and the cultural institutions’ side) and getting a better design. The design was meant more as a 20 year strategy for
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improvement, aiming at adding more cafes and restaurants, more and better trees, better pedestrian and cycling paths, a higher quality of the overall space, changing the space more into a central ‘common’, better integrating the Museumplein with the surrounding areas (the octopus concept), creating better places to sit and improving the square as a platform for cultural programming. Due to the crisis and lack of city funds, the design was not adopted but is still used as a long-term strategy underneath the smaller changes around the restructured Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum.
5. Conclusion: towards a place-based strategy The Museumplein has drastically improved by fixing past mistakes and creating better maintenance systems by the District Zuid. It seems that now, a lot could be gained by improving Museumplein through placemaking, especially in the context of the increasingly busy surrounding areas. Proximal assets and nearby destinations are vast, but its not a destination in and of itself. An important target group should be Amsterdammers themselves, creating a better balance on Museumplein instead a tourist bubble. However, so far, efforts to improve the situation and the identity of the space have not succeeded. Neither the city nor the cultural institutions have felt the urgency to take the lead. Thus we are left with the question: who will and can take the initiative? Hans Karssenberg, Stipo Meredith Glaser, Stipo November 2013 www.stipo.nl
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