Ode to Margaret Kropholler | First Dutch female architect

I spoke to your daughter, Margaret, at a reception. She was the first to tell me about you, her name was also Margaret, what a coincidence. Reception for what? That the renovation was finished of a part of the Holendrecht street, odd side. Yes exactly, your street. You know, in Plan Zuid. In '22 you were commissioned to design the facade. 

That you have no lack of imagination we already knew, the villas you had erected a few years earlier in Park Meerwijk in Bergen ... insane, enchanting! Those liquid facades and roofs - Plan the impossible, the credo of the Amsterdam School. But also everything behind it, right down to the forks and spoons. Private individuals with money as well as taste, what better people to have as clients? Well girl, a hundred years later those Bergen villas are still shining and caressing countless eyes.

The Holendrechtstraat was a completely different story, so also a different challenge. This time the money was certainly not piling up. No villas this time, but social housing. Your assignment was limited to the facade. As much as you would have liked to be involved with the inside, especially with the layout, here too. So many progressive ideas were in your head, brilliant in their simplicity, which could make the hard work of the housewife easier. So many practical insights, some of which you also stubbornly tried to force down the throats of the four “owner-builders,” the project developers who were to build on the part of the property behind the facade.

Got that bitch again, muttered one, she's driving me crazy. What is she meddling with? None of these four men had ever washed a cup or boiled an egg. Confection, that was what they wanted, straightforward standard homes. You could come and stick a facade on it to get their project through the beauty committee. But be careful with the money, know your place! Even in those years, such constructions were mockingly referred to as 'apron architecture'.

So you cursed softly and complied, you, the only woman in this man's world, the first Dutch woman architect. By law, you were not even legally competent. You designed the facade, almost 200 meters long, an elongated apron, a facade that had to give unity to the streetscape. The facade as a whole, so characteristic of the Amsterdam School. How did you tackle this? First you draped a double-folded piece of puff pastry one hundred meters long carelessly against the left half of the planned houses. 

Then, like a magic trick, you whipped that patch open and covered the right half with it too for perfect symmetry. Oh, on either side there was still some left. Oh well, you know what, for the lucky few on the far left and right of the long block, you folded it into a lovely wavy balcony, three on top of each other on both sides. Finally, with the very last remnants you modelled a few fiddly little balconies on either side, which were little more than caverns. But those who came to live there didn't have to complain that their neighbors had larger ones, because most people in the street didn't have a front balcony at all.

The whole thing was garnished with beautiful and often not very functional woodwork for windows and doors. Finally, at the very top, you stuck a few long strips of roof tiles against the gable, three tiles high, making fun of gravity, the brick as ornament, to make everything a gesamtkunstwerk full of hidden details. Everything worked together, everything breathed the same spirit. Done!

But as it goes, tastes change and always there is a shortage of money. After a few decades and countless renovations, not much remained of all that beauty and splendor. Your facade soured and impoverished, the first plans to demolish the entire block were forged. In the early 1990s, however, the tide turned. The architectural style of the Amsterdam School was rediscovered, and the Housing Corporation managed to get its hands on three quarters of your block in the Holendrechtstraat. What an opportunity! A whole team went to work restoring the facade to its original state. Using your original drawings. All under the guidance of a female architect: Marloes van Haaren. You would have liked her very much.

Your daughter, she must have been in her seventies, was sitting there at that reception, in the early summer of '96, admittedly a little stiff on a chair, but I also saw her beaming. Who was this woman? Curious, I sat down next to her. She introduced herself. What a lucky man I am, I cried. I have been given a beautiful home on a beautiful street with my girlfriend. A home that I look up to proudly when I come home from work: this is where I live. She smiled mildly, all stiffness melting away.  One handshake away from the creator of my home! I realized excitedly. Once the ice was broken she told me about you and all your practical insights. She explained how some of your original ideas about the layout had been realized in the renovation. It became a delightful conversation. I can tell you, Margaret, in case you didn't know, but your daughter was terribly proud of you.

Still I live on that wonderful street. My children were born into beauty, and it did them good. By now I know much more about you. I have read books and seen a movie about you. I know about your work in Orteliusstraat on the edge of Old West, and about the Louise Wenthuis, your very last project, almost around the corner, built in 1963 for single working women. Truly right up your alley. There is more, but I am especially proud to live on your most beautiful street.

One of those tiny balconies, one of those caverns you kneaded out of the last piece of puff pastry, it's mine. You can sit there cramped but also snug and enjoy the evening. We call it our crockpot.