Finance History | Beurs van Berlage, Damrak, Amsterdam, 1903 — Built by a Man Who Thought the Stock Trade Was Temporary

The architect of Amsterdam's third exchange was a socialist who did not expect the stock trade to last. He designed the building so it could become something else afterwards. Hendrik Petrus Berlage got the commission after the city council decided in 1896 to replace the exchange it already had. That one, by Jan David Zocher, had opened in 1845 on the other side of the Dam where De Bijenkorf now stands, and it was disliked from the start. Its nearly windowless Roman-inspired front earned it the nickname the Mausoleum, and the merchants and the Chamber of Commerce had been complaining about it for decades. Berlage's building went up on reclaimed land over the Damrak, the covered-in remains of the city's oldest harbour basin, and was finished in 1903. Sources give the start of construction as either 1896 or 1898. What he built was red brick with stone piers and lintels and an iron and glass roof, plain where Amsterdam's other new public buildings were busy with Gothic and Renaissance ornament. It broke with the copying, and the Amsterdam School and Dutch modernism both trace back through it. He treated it as a total work, bringing in artists whose sculpture and decoration set out the history of Dutch trade along the walls, and put a clock tower over it with a bell that rang the sessions. Each branch of trade got its own floor from 1903, which is the arrangement of the 1611 exchange again with storeys instead of pillars. The largest hall was for commodities, with sugar, coffee and tea from the Indies, and grain and securities had their own floors. The securities floor was too small almost immediately. The traders complained about the heating, the ventilation and the cracks opening in the facades as the building settled on its piles, applied to the city for somewhere better, were refused, and built their own exchange across the square instead. Beursplein 5 opened in 1913 and still houses Euronext Amsterdam; some accounts date the move 1912. Other trading carried on here, including the Amsterdam options exchange in the former grain hall between 1978 and 1987, and some business remained until 1998. The foundation piles rotted, demolition was proposed, and the building was saved in 1970 and listed. Berlage was wrong about the stock trade, which is thriving a hundred metres away. He was right about his building, which has spent longer as a public hall than it ever spent as an exchange, and now holds concerts, exhibitions and conferences in the room where the sugar was sold. Cover photo: C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, the Damrak frontage with the building's name across it. Second image: Txllxt TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, one of the stone figures set into the corner of the brickwork, part of the sculptural programme on Dutch trade. Coordinates 52.375022, 4.896265, resolved by Nominatim for Damrak 243. Accurate to about 25 m.