Beurs van Berlage

This guide to Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam opens with the 1884 competition for a new exchange, a winning design exposed as a near-copy of a French town hall, and years of quarrels before a city alderman quietly summoned a fourth-place finisher. It follows Hendrik Petrus Berlage's socialist convictions into the building's thick red-brick walls and forty-metre clock tower, and the construction crisis when the structure began sinking into the old riverbed beneath it. Queen Wilhelmina herself opened the doors in nineteen-oh-three.