Holland House - City of London (London) - Architecture Prizes on Waymarking.com

Hidden in the giant shade of jewel of contemporary architecture, The Gherkin, is one of the most precious Art Deco structures in Britain - Holland House by a prominent Dutch architect and RIBA Royal Gold Medal awardee Hendrik Petrus Berlage.

Greatly inspired by his travels in America, H.P. Berlage’s completion of Holland House in the City of London in 1916 created one of the first steel-framed buildings in Europe.

For all the wartime destruction and crass redevelopment, the City of London still contains many almost mythical curiosities. For architects, one of the most fascinating of these is the great Dutch architect HP Berlage’s office building in Bury Street.

Originally, this dog-leg thoroughfare was one of the narrowest streets within the historic walls, but when Foster & Partners’ Swiss Re was built, the whole of the street’s west side was demolished to create the forecourt needed to bring the circular Gherkin down to the ground in the middle of the ancient, tightly-ravelled urban texture. This means that now you can see Berlage’s main facade straight on from the new piazzetta, instead of obliquely, as it had to be when it was built.

Holland House, built in 1916 was, as Pevsner remarked, “very alien to the London of its date”: strongly vertical in emphasis with closely spaced thin mullions, set on a regular grid and chamfered in plan to emphasise their slenderness. In the glazed strips between the mullions, floors are marked by ceramic spandrels, each with a square boss in its centre. The frame structure is steel, one of the first in London — and indeed the whole of Europe.

[source: www.landmarkplc.com]

Hendrik Petrus Berlage (21 February 1856 – 12 August 1934) was was born in Amsterdam. He studied architecture at the Zurich Institute of Technology between 1875 and 1878 after which he traveled extensively for 3 years through Europe. In the 1880s he formed a Partnership in the Netherlands with Theodore Sanders which produced a mixture of practical and utopian projects. A published author, Berlage held memberships in various architectural societies including CIAM I.

Berlage was influenced by the Neo-Romanesque brickwork architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson and of the combination of structures of iron seen with brick of the Castle of the Three Geckos of Domènech i Montaner. This influence is visible in his design for the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange, for which he would also draw on the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc. The load-bearing bare brick walls and the notion of the primacy of space, and of walls as the creators of form, would be the constitutive principles of the 'Hollandse Zakelijkheid'. A visit Berlage made to the U.S. in 1911 greatly affected his architecture. From then on the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright would be a significant influence. Lectures he gave when returned to Europe would help to disseminate Wright's thoughts in Germany.

Considered the "Father of Modern architecture" in the Netherlands and the intermediary between the Traditionalists and the Modernists, Berlage's theories inspired most Dutch architectural groups of the 1920s, including the Traditionalists, the Amsterdam School, De Stijl and the New Objectivists. He received the British RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1932. [wiki]