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Metaphor and Metropolis
Nancy Stieber
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar, the Netherlands
Telephone: +31-(0)70-512 27 00
Telefax: +31-(0)70-511 71 62
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: www.nias.knaw.nl
The Thirtieth Uhlenbeck Lecture was held in Wassenaar 30 May 2012
NIAS, Wassenaar, 2012/2
ISBN 978-90-71093-72-2
ISSN 0921-4372; 30
(c) NIAS 2012. No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means
without written permission from the publisher.
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Metaphor and Metropolis
Nearly 20 years ago, the always provocative and highly influential Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas threw down the gauntlet in an essay entitled ‘The generic city’ when
he proclaimed: ‘The city is no longer.’1 Koolhaas’s startling premise was based on
his claim that the historical identity of the city had come to exercise a stranglehold
on urban design. The only way forward, the only way to reanimate the unhindered
dynamics of city growth and form, he said, would be to dismiss the outdated
theatre of historic urban identity. Liberated, we would then be free to pursue the
presentism of contemporary development, that is, we could concentrate only on
the present and discard the past. Koolhaas ascribed the demise of urban identity
to sociological causes. He theorised that exponential population growth robs a
city of its character. Historical centres marked by a potent urban identity do not
represent the realities of burgeoning populations and sprawling extensions. Even
in cities where identity is maintained, tourism has a way of transforming historical
character into superficial iconicity of diminished value.
Koolhaas’s polemics of 1994 must be understood as a cri de coeur against the
overly enthusiastic embrace by planners and architects of historical context as a
1 Rem Koolhaas, ‘The Generic City’, in: Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli
Press, 1995), p. 1264.
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guiding principle for urban development. At the time, there was a case to be made
that this attitude had shackled free experimentation and invention. But his
statement goes further than that. It asks what meanings ‘the city’ itself can have
in postmodern society and culture, a question that continues to resonate today.
We now ask ourselves about the meaning of high-rise expansions in Dubai, about
the wholesale demolition of entire neighbourhoods in Beijing, about the seemingly
endless Burolandschaft that forms an anonymous no man’s land around urban
centres. Who among us has not had occasion to comment on the relative
sameness of airports throughout the world? Koolhaas offered the counterintuitive
suggestion that we welcome ‘the city without history’, that we embrace the
repetitive anonymity of generic cities and celebrate their capacity to reinvent their
identities every morning. In essence, he was claiming that maintenance of a stable
urban identity is no longer viable; the price we pay to preserve urban character is
simply too high because its maintenance requires continuous adjustments to
serve current needs. Indeed, as we alter the city to make it viable today, we end
up diluting the very essence we want to preserve. Echoing the kind of argument
proffered by the Futurists at the eve of the First World War, Koolhaas tells us that
continuous construction and demolition is the natural condition of contemporary
urban design. The urban identity to which so many people are attached is nothing
more than a performance, he claims, adding ‘We can leave the theatre now’.2
It is easy to agree with Koolhaas that defenders of cultural heritage can block
architectural and planning innovation. But why must we assume that urban
identity can only be maintained by means of preservation measures that freeze
the city in time and space? To do so is to overlook the historic record which shows
the many ways in which cities have re-created and reinvented themselves,
repeatedly reconstituting their identities. In this lecture, I hope to demonstrate
that we should never underestimate the imaginative power of a city and its
inhabitants. I will focus on one of the many tools available to produce urban
identity, the visual metaphor, and show that the theatre of urban character is a
continuous performance of the visual imagination.
By calling on the visual imagination as a source of renewal for urban identity, I am
not referring to city marketing tools. In recent years there has been a tendency to
conflate the meaning of urban identity and character with the efforts of cities
2 Ibid.
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around the globe to advertise themselves and create an easily identified image or
logo. This commercialisation of urban identity may be an interesting phenomenon
to study in itself, but it obscures some other important ways in which we identify
cities visually. Cities can be represented by a number of different visual strategies,
including the collective self-representation of the city, that is, the way in which
people in the city construct a vision of it. I call this the autobiography of the city.
Obsessed as we have become with the way the media try to shape our
perceptions, we tend to forget that we experience cities on multiple planes. We
build individual perceptions of our cities based on the experience of daily life.
These may contribute to a personal collage of images that represent the city to the
individual. At the collective level, we share with others the perception that those
disparate experiences can be collated into a totality that constitutes ‘the city.’ In
the course of daily life we often have occasion to refer to the city as a totality even
though we never actually see, hear or observe through any other sense the city in
toto. Indeed, the convention of referring to ‘the city’ as an entity or a particular
city as an independent organism is part of common parlance. Upon the recent
celebration of the 100th anniversary of Boston’s great baseball stadium Fenway
Park, it was common to hear Harvard and MIT referred to as the brains of the city
and Fenway Park as its heart. Casting the city in the guise of a personage with
bodily organs fits in with the populace’s own perception of its home town. We still
see cities as living entities, even when we are faced with the apparent
incomprehensibility of the expanding metropolis. Examined once again in this
light, we find that Koolhaas’s generic city ironically shares a key feature with the
urban identity against which he protests. Both depend on the assumption that one
can speak about the city as a whole. Both concepts require us to assume that it
makes sense to speak of the city as a single entity, even though that notion cannot
be observed empirically. In other words, we frequently turn to rhetorical devices
if we wish to encapsulate the city.
As urban historians and sociologists have taught us, a city is an amalgam of many
simultaneous social, political, economic and cultural processes. The very word
city defies simple definition. Can we say what we mean by city in terms of
function? As soon as we try, the functions begin to change. The population size of
cities varies immensely. Topographical definitions are no help – cities can be found
under a myriad of topographical conditions. Legal specifics vary through culture
and time. If we are strict about it, we have to admit that there is no single variable
or set of variables that can be used to define what we mean by city. Yet this has
seldom been seen as a problem. We find ancient poems dedicated to cities; we
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speak of Dickens’s London, Hugo’s Paris, Pamuk’s Istanbul. We refer to a given city
as if it existed continuously through time, though the material conditions of that
city are changing ceaselessly. The very dynamism of change that seems to
characterise the urban condition makes it difficult to pin down the city with any
given definition. Yet we refer to a city much as we refer to an individual, as a being
that exists through time organically, an entity that can grow, flourish, decline,
recover – something that appears to have a life.
This lecture is devoted to the usefulness of visual metaphors as a means of
contending with the dynamic nature of the urban condition. My focus will be on
Amsterdam around 1900, a period in which the city was undergoing major
transformations that challenged received modes of perception much as today we
confront urban changes at ever greater scales. I plan to illustrate some of the
multifarious ways that visual metaphor performs the cultural work of making
sense of the city. However illusory, distorting or reductive these visual metaphors
may be, they serve as conduits for channelling the visceral anxieties and hopes
attending urban change. My hope is that this historical review will unravel some
of the nuances with which the imagination operates on the city. Insight into the
ways visual metaphors performed in the past may illuminate our own needs and
desire for compelling representations of today’s sprawling cities.
This is not the time or place to define metaphor. That would be an interesting
exercise, but one that is more likely to advance our thinking about the philosophy
of language than about the city. Rather, I propose to examine the metaphors
through which one given city has been viewed and to see what they can tell us
about the history of perceiving that city. Metaphor thus becomes a diagnostic tool
for historical insight. My focus will be on a select number of visual metaphors that
were prevalent around the year 1900. This period is particularly relevant because
the city of Amsterdam was then undergoing rapid and dramatic changes that
disoriented the inhabitants, robbing them of familiar sights and forcing them to
ask themselves how the city should be shaped in the future. For the populace of
Amsterdam at the time, as for those living in other cities undergoing major
transformations at the fin de siècle like Vienna, London and Barcelona, trying to
comprehend the city’s changes was as challenging as the situation we are facing
today in attempting to understand the sprawling megalopolis.
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Amsterdam around 1900
Around 1900, Amsterdam had reached a curious interlude in its history. Its
population had doubled in the previous 40 years, the fastest growth the city had
experienced in over 300 years. To accommodate that growth, the city had just
added a ring of new development, the first to arise outside boundaries that had
been in place since the 17th century, when its famous half-moon perimeter was
put in place. The new additions were gridded neighbourhoods with little visual
connection to the form or character of the older city. The design and functioning
of the new districts favoured speculative real-estate ventures that quickly satisfied
the need for residential quarters at different income levels.
In 1900 Amsterdam was poised for continued growth beyond the first modern
ring of development, but it was also at the cusp of important new social, political
and cultural changes. Two groups in particular – the working class and the
Catholic population – were starting to insist on full participation in the public
realm, which until then had been the almost exclusive domain of the liberal
bourgeoisie. In the decades around 1900, a complex rearrangement of the public
realm occurred, as groups that had previously been excluded gained a voice in
municipal government and in the public institutions of the city. Yet, despite the
ideological and religious divisions of Amsterdam’s population, despite labour
strife, a battle for subsidies for parochial schools, and continuing tensions
between working-class Catholics, Socialists and monarchists, by 1925 Amsterdam
had laid out a second modern ring of development with an aesthetic that
contrasted sharply with the late 19th-century ring.
The contrast between these two periods of urban expansion reflects a variety of
influences, including principles of design developed within the nascent profession
of urban planning. However, I would suggest that we examine the physical
development of Amsterdam from another vantage point, from within the
autobiography of the city. People who live in cities generate images of it in order
to present it to themselves and others according to their own interpretations of its
character and significance. They create urban images to fulfil their own needs.
Such images, drawn from various sources and reflecting various perspectives,
collectively produce a self-image of the city. I envisage a history of the city’s
development that takes into account its self-perception, how it imagined itself
visually. In this way we can observe the city itself at work as an agent in its own
development. Specifically, there is ample documentary evidence to study the city’s
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own perceptions of its character and aesthetics. In the case of Amsterdam, the
city’s character is mentioned directly and indirectly in countless documents, in
occasional statements made by architects, in newspaper articles, and in the
deliberations of the municipal council. Repeatedly, we encounter assumptions
about what Amsterdam should look like and positions on Amsterdam’s visual
image. The sense that the city had a character crossed political, religious and class
identities. By 1900, there was growing conviction that choices about the city’s
further development should be influenced by that character. The city’s
characteristic identity was expected to have an impact on the choices of style for
buildings, the location of new traffic routes, the redesign of squares, preservation
criteria, the creation of new neighbourhoods. ‘Character’ was not a factor when
the planning of the first modern ring of development took place. What made it so
evident in the discussions of the next ring?
The obvious answer was an attitude toward the 19th-century additions that was
expressed repeatedly in newspapers, architects’ journals and municipal committee
discussions: namely, they were perceived as ugly and thus as not living up to the
prevalent image of older portions of the city as beautiful. From that attitude
sprang the new ambition to make the next expansion respond to the city’s urban
legacy, to ensure that the same mistake not be made again. But to say this is still
to beg the question. What was the image of the city in the imagination of
Amsterdammers? Where did it come from? How did it vary from group to group?
What values sustained it? Which specific images of Amsterdam were at work?
When did perception of the beauty of the older parts of Amsterdam first become
a factor in public discussions?
To map out those visual imaginings, their variety, their interrelationships, their
changes over time, and the social processes which they enabled and which
enabled them goes beyond the purview of this talk. I call them to mind in order
to place my topic in a particular historiographical context. Paying heed to the
larger culture in which the design professions were embedded helps us focus on
the patterns in popular perceptions of the city’s character and thus avoid the
constraints of a history conceived purely according to the terms of a professional
discipline. I am not looking primarily at urban representations produced by
planners in my effort to map the Amsterdam imaginary around 1900. Nor am I
investigating the view from the ground, that is the lived experience of daily life.
Day-to-day city life gives rise to individual imaginings composed of countless
disparate fragments and may contribute to an individual’s idiosyncratic reading of
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the city. In my effort to map the Amsterdam imaginary around 1900, rather than
investigating private mental constructs, I will be looking at images widely
accessible in the public realm, whether published in newspapers and magazines,
or as postcards, stage sets, posters, public sculpture, prints or paintings. These
both express and shape shared, collective perceptions of the city.
Around 1900 Amsterdam, like many other western industrial cities, was
undergoing rapid changes in all areas of life. Imagining the city through visual
representations was one way of contending with that flux and change. The use of
images to organize the perception of change was an almost desperate necessity.
In the struggle to make sense of a modern condition in which all that is solid melts
into air, visualization could allow one to see the city as a stable whole. Although
the city never was and still is not a single entity or organism, rhetorical images of
Amsterdam around 1900 allowed one to visualise it as if it were. Visual metaphors
made the fragmented and collaged nature of urban experience comprehensible, as
if it were possible to essentialise it. Those are the metaphorical and rhetorical
images that I have been charting, trying to map the relationships between them,
looking at their histories, watching as they get rejected, altered and reinvested
with new meaning. This history reveals how people attached meaning to the city
and made sense of it. It raises the question how past visual imaginaries relate to
imagining the future of the city. And it suggests that Koolhaas’s point of view may
have been too pessimistic. If we understand how potent a tool metaphors can be
in the continuous invention of urban identity, then the theatre of urban character
he declared obsolete may still be open for business.
Personification
We will start our study of Amsterdam’s visual metaphors with the most selfevident device of all: the representation of the city as a person. This is the figure
that most clearly expresses the idea that a city is an organic entity with its own
personality and its own life history. For nearly 50 years, the visual image of
Amsterdam as a person appeared regularly in the pages of a popular weekly
newspaper, De Amsterdammer. There, starting from 1886, the Amsterdam-born
illustrator Johan Braakensiek (1858-1940) produced a weekly political cartoon on
a large separate sheet that was often what people turned to first when they got
the paper. The cartoon would be posted in barber shop windows, at the
tobacconist’s, at the baker’s. It was in the air, it was part of the general culture.
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Figure 1. Braakensiek's first Amsterdam Maiden in De Amsterdammer
Johan Braakensiek, ‘Voor en na de Annexatie’, De Amsterdammer, 19 December 1886.
Braakensiek’s plate usually made a sardonic comment on a recent piece of news.
His touch was gentle and he avoided provocation. The newspaper itself, in the
decades around 1900, espoused a progressive position. De Amsterdammer
identified with the radical liberals who at that time were refashioning municipal
government, enlarging its powers to provide services and infrastructure such as
utilities, public transportation, better harbour facilities, a new Exchange building.
From the first year that the cartoon began appearing, Braakensiek represented the
city of Amsterdam as a larger-than-life personification, the direct descendant of an
allegorical tradition from the lustrous 17th century. In her first appearance (fig. 1),
dignitaries from the towns around Amsterdam, fearful of eventual annexation by
the city, are trying to corset her to prevent her from expanding into their bailiwicks.
The satirical context itself deprives the Amsterdam Maiden of much of the nobility
of demeanour that characterised her 17th-century allegorical predecessors. The
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Figure 2. Amsterdam as the 'Empress of Europe'
Frontispiece, O. Dapper, Historische Beschryvinghe van Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Iacob van Meurs, 1663).
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resemblance is however evident, and Braakensiek has kept a few of the attributes
belonging to earlier personifications of the city. A good example of the latter is
found in the frontispiece to Olfert Dapper’s city history of 1663 (fig. 2). Amsterdam
is enthroned as Vondel’s ‘Empress of Europe’, wearing the crown that Emperor
Maximilian granted to the city in 1489 as a seal of approval and that distinguished
Amsterdam’s coat of arms. Her arm rests on the city arms themselves, with their
triple X insignia of St. Andrew’s crosses. The 17th-century personification is
surrounded, as she often is, by references to trade and global reach: first the river
gods, then the four continents paying homage to her mercantile might; often we
also see the bales and packages that denote the goods that stream to her. She is
presented as a goddess and empress, an evocation of the Amsterdam burghers’
confidence that Amsterdam has become a new Rome, taking its place in the
pantheon of great cities. In the presence of Mercury or the goddess of fame, this
glorification suggests the achievement of immortality, a timelessness beyond
human intervention. Amsterdam has been taken out of time and enthroned for all
eternity. In her manifestation as metaphorical Empress of the Seas, this burgher city
could presume to address royalty as an equal. Indeed, when a royal personage
visited the city, as on the occasion of Marie de Medici’s entry in 1638, she was
greeted by the personification of Amsterdam in elaborate pageantry. In many ways,
the personification compensated for the royal attributes that the merchant regents
themselves lacked, just as the new Amsterdam city hall announced an equivalency
to royal prerogative by housing the city government in a palace.
Braakensiek’s personification of Amsterdam starts out as a more earthbound
variation of the older one. She is still enthroned, proudly carrying the crown of
Emperor Maximilian, her clothing adorned with the three St. Andrew’s crosses
copied from the city’s arms. By 1900, however, the artist had quietly removed all
references to the long bygone mercantile wealth of Amsterdam. What remains at
first is a giantess, a female body that needs to be controlled by tiny men.
Amsterdam then becomes a bourgeois lady, most frequently portrayed as a
substantial and respectable matron or young lady. The St. Andrew’s crosses are
still prominently displayed on her dress, but her crown is now tiny. Her gown is
no longer styled as the raiment of a heavenly goddess. Instead, it follows the
latest fashions (fig. 3).
Braakensiek’s Amsterdam, no longer glorified, is engaged in the most ordinary of
activities. She is used to represent the physical changes in the city – Braakensiek
returns repeatedly to the metaphor of the corset or the Maiden’s girth when
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Figure 3. Amsterdam as a bourgeois lady
Johan Braakensiek, ‘Gemeentelijke exploitatie van de gasfabriek?’ De Amsterdammer, 12 May 1895.
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referring to the city’s expansion, just as he shows her shopping to refer to the
municipal budget. The topics of his commentary are entirely local in character. He
uses the personification to comment on the municipal takeover of utilities, the
large canal works and improved shipping routes, the annexation of nearby towns,
and municipal labour relations. Amsterdam appears frequently with her son
Mercury, representing trade, as a vehicle for observations on the city’s economic
fortunes. But most of all she appears as the city government itself, representing
the town council as a housewife with bills to pay, her eye on goods she would like
to acquire, like a new theatre. Often, she must submit to the will of her husband,
the mayor. We also find her flirting with a worker whose labour conditions she has
just regulated. Over the decades that this personification was used to represent
the city’s travails and challenges, Braakensiek let her keep up with the times. Her
hemline shortened, her hair style changed. In the 1920s she became a flapper
(fig. 4). What did not vary were the themes and concerns raised in the cartoons.
The Maiden of Amsterdam remained a vehicle for raising questions about the
appointments and resignations of mayors, the comings and goings of aldermen,
municipal elections, and other local matters.
The most obvious aspect of this image of Amsterdam is that it is a continuation
of an allegorical trope in use for 300 years or more. That has the advantage of
familiarity – few Amsterdammers would fail to recognise it. It also sustained the
notion that the city could be understood as a total and autonomous entirety, a
single body. Her crown may have become tiny, but so had Amsterdam’s claim to
power in the world.
The topics of Braakensiek’s cartoons were always suggested by the editors of the
newspaper. Around 1900 they used his Maiden of Amsterdam to normalise the
opinions being promulgated by radical liberal politics. The Maiden of Amsterdam is
benign, she is beloved, you can get angry with her, she may behave foolishly, but
she is solidly respectable and reliable – much as the radical liberals felt about the
municipal council. The positive attitude toward Amsterdam municipal politics
expressed through Braakensiek’s version of the Amsterdam Maiden becomes even
more evident if you compare his charming ladies with examples of the Amsterdam
personification that appeared in the socialist satirical press. They are no less
essentialist than the liberal personification, but they undermine the Maiden’s
legitimacy by giving her a distorted body and an ugly face. However, the most
interesting aspect of Braakensiek’s personification is that she has been made subject
to time. No longer protected from the ravages of time as was the 17th-century
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Figure 4. Amsterdam as a flapper
Johan Braakensiek, ‘De Verkiezingsreclame’, De Groene Amsterdammer, 13 June 1925.
Amsterdam Maiden, Braakensiek’s modern Maiden exists within the unfolding of
time. She is being used to discuss the concerns of the present, not to indicate, as in
the 17th century, the attainment of eternal glory. Even more than the changing
haircuts and the hemlines, this is what makes her a marker of the city’s identification
with modernity. Though still recognisable as a whole and unfragmented body, she
has been made subject to change. It is as if the seasoned and reassuring
personification mediates the threat posed by the passage of time. She expresses the
present by acting out contemporary roles, yet affirms the integrity of the city as a
continuous institution, negotiating modernity without apparent conflict. That the city
exists in time is made palpable by visions of the City Maiden.
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The plan as icon of the city
At the same time that Braakensiek was entertaining the Amsterdam public with his
ever-modernising version of the Amsterdam City Maiden, a Young Turk among
modern Dutch architects, Willem Kromhout (1864-1940), was rejuvenating
another feature of popular culture in the city: festive decorations. Although
Kromhout was an avid proponent of the renewal of architectural language, when
he was called upon to design the decorations for the investiture of Wilhelmina in
1898 he nonetheless reverted to a historical interpretation of the city. The
beautifully executed abstract forms he produced have long been celebrated for
rejecting the conventional solution for public celebrations, which was to fashion
plaster structures meant to imitate historic buildings. Kromhout chose instead to
line the royal entry route with plainly exposed nautical materials – coloured wood,
cloth and rope – that explicitly called up associations with the greatness of the
Dutch seafaring past and present. His brilliant decorations accentuated the spatial
nature of the city by laying out garlands along the main canals. Less well known
is his initial and unexecuted proposal for the decorations, a ‘historic line’, as he
called it, in the form of a series of emblematic references to the various provinces.
Significantly, Amsterdam was depicted as it looked in 1578, the moment when the
city ‘altered’ from the Catholic camp to the Protestant, Orange cause during the
rebellion against Spain. Kromhout’s plan followed the canals that marked the city
limits in the famous bird’s-eye view of Amsterdam published in 1544 by Cornelis
Antoniszoon (ca. 1505-1553). Because this was not the path designated for
Wilhelmina’s entry, the scheme was not carried out. There might have been
another reason as well. In 1578 the Catholic municipal leaders were exiled, an
association that may have been considered too provocative.3
The plan of 1544, a woodcut on twelve sheets based on Cornelis Antoniszoon’s
earlier painting of the city from 1538, had by 1900 long been an icon of the city
(fig. 5). Variations of his composition had been published repeatedly. Its angled
view from the northwest became the standard one for presenting the city visually,
even in subsequent maps showing its expansion. Eventually it became
metonymic: a partial image representing the whole. The iconic value of the 16th-
3 Nancy Stieber, ‘Marking Time and Space in the City: Kromhout’s Decorations for the Investiture of
Wilhelmina in Amsterdam’, in: Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, eds., Festival Architecture
(London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 181-214.
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Figure 5. Plan of Amsterdam by Cornelis Antoniszoon (1544)
century bird’s-eye view for Amsterdam’s self-image was reinforced repeatedly in
the late 19th century, as Amsterdam’s medieval history was reinterpreted as the
harbinger of its later economic supremacy. The map was exhibited prominently at
historical exhibitions as the most important monument of Amsterdam’s
topography. A full-colour version was reproduced in conjunction with a new book
on Amsterdam’s Middle Ages by the popular historian Jan ter Gouw. Ter Gouw
wanted every reader of his history of Amsterdam to have access to the map in an
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authentic, full-size reproduction. This, he wrote, allows us to see the Amsterdam
of that time so clearly before us that we have only to enter imaginatively through
the gate on the map to walk around the old city.4 The map itself becomes the
visual gateway for a visit to Amsterdam’s past, a visual stage for imagining history.
Amsterdam as historical and allegorical palimpsest
A more literal ‘stage’ for presenting Amsterdam’s past was provided by a
legendary theatrical performance. For over 300 years, Amsterdam was
represented yearly in the theatre with the New Year’s production of Joost van der
Vondel’s 1637 tragedy Gysbreght van Aemstel. One of the sources most central to
the construction of Amsterdam’s self-image, the 17th-century play traces the
tragic defeat and exile in 1300 of Amsterdam’s lord, Gijsbrecht van Amstel.
Vondel’s play, first performed in 1638, is modelled closely on Virgil’s second book
of the Aeneid, with Gijsbrecht portrayed as an Aeneas figure and Amsterdam, like
Troy, burned to the ground. At the deepest moment of despair, as Gijsbrecht,
about to leave his city forever, watches it go up in flames, the archangel Raphael
miraculously appears to tell him that in 300 years his city will rise to greater glory
and ‘lift her crown to heaven’. The angel predicts: ‘Though it lies in ruins, the city
will not tremble, it will rise again in greater glory out of ash and dust’ –
Al leit de stad verwoest, en wil daer niet van yzen:
Zy zal met grooter glans uit asch en stof verrijzen.
– a prediction fulfilled in Vondel’s time, as he puts it, under the wise governance of
Amsterdam’s mayors. The play is a self-congratulatory paean to the glories of the
Golden Age, imbued with a sense of Amsterdam’s importance. From 1641 on it was
performed annually, a tradition in civic pride that continued unabated until 1968.
Vondel (1587-1679) was typically indifferent to historical accuracy. His story not
only conflates the histories of several lords of Amstel but also plays fast and loose
with Amsterdam topography. In order to make the events more actual for his
4 De vermaerde koopstadt van Amstelredam: gheconterfeyt met al sijn wateren ... Wtgegeven by Cornelis
Anthoniszoon Schilder ... 1544, in: Johannes ter Gouw, Geschiedenis van Amsterdam, vol. 5
(Amsterdam: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1885).
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Figure 6. The audience at an 1885 performance of the Gysbrecht
Johan Braakensiek, ‘Ons Publiek bij Vondel’s Gijsbrecht’, De Amsterdammer, 18 January 1885.
audience, he refers to structures, like the surrounding fortification wall, that did
not exist in 1300. The walls that were still standing in Vondel’s time were
remnants of subsequent construction, but to a 17th-century viewer they would
have been venerable mementoes of Amsterdam’s past. In the mid-19th century,
under the influence of the Romantic desire for verisimilitude and the Romantic
interest in the Middle Ages, sets and costumes for Gysbreght productions were
produced with meticulous attention to period accuracy and authenticity. In his
magisterial edition of Vondel’s works, the literary scholar Jacob van Lennep (180268) used the 1544 map by Cornelis Antoniszoon to identify Vondel’s dramatic
locations. Vondel, he claims, wrote his medieval story with 16th-century
Amsterdam in mind.
The Romantic ambition to stage the Gysbreght with historical accuracy had its
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roots in an increasing desire for direct and visceral contact with the past and a
fascination with antiquarian reconstruction of times gone by. Charles Rochussen’s
illustrations for the 1841 edition of the play follow the tendency of the time to
interpret it as history rather than emphasize Vondel’s symbolic reference to the
rise of Amsterdam in the 17th century. The aim of productions was to provide the
audience with the illusion of witnessing the past. Indeed, by the 1880s the yearly
dramatic production had become increasingly histrionic in its attempts to imbue
the characters with the human emotions of the historical moment portrayed.
Braakensiek
affectionately
captures
the
audience
–
a
wide
range
of
Amsterdammers bridging all classes – relating in a variety of ways to the familiar
events: ‘Guys, here comes the angel!’ cries one working-class kid from the
cheapest seats in the house (fig. 6). Another satirical print takes the point of view
espoused by some progressive avant-garde cultural critics that the Gysbreght
tradition had become moribund and its annual production nothing more than a
bourgeois ritual and a spectacle for the masses, absurdly theatrical and operatic
in its direction, hopelessly antiquarian and Romantic in its sets and costumes.
From that avant-garde reaction emerged a new publication of the play between
1893 and 1901. The scholarly introduction by Leo Simons (1862-1932) states that
the central subject of the play is the city of Amsterdam.5 The sets, he argued,
should represent the city not in false historical imitation but symbolically. The
architect H.P. Berlage (1856-1934) collaborated on this publication and designed
sets that would prove influential for the early 20th-century productions of the
play. His sets are bold abstractions of the old city gates and were meant to be kept
up during the entire performance, in support of the emblematic reading of the
play. For these progressives, the re-interpretation of Vondel gave the Gysbreght a
new and added urgency. Espousing the view that contemporary Amsterdam was
entering a second Golden Age, and taking the angel’s prediction to apply to a new
Amsterdam that would now arise, they looked forward to a democratic and
socialist Amsterdam in the coming century. In this way a traditional item of
cultural heritage associated with the city was adopted for a modern message and
point of view. Just as Braakensiek’s City Maiden was given new life in a
contemporary context, the Gysbreght was reinvested with meaning for a
contemporary perception of the city’s historical development.
5 ‘De Stad blijft onwrikbaar de hoofdfiguur’, L. Simons et al., Gysbrecht van Aemstel: d'ondergang van
syn stad en syn ballingschap: treurspel (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1893) vol. 1, p. 60.
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Figure 7. ‘Amsterdam in Vondels Verbeelding’ by H. P. Berlage
In: Leo Simons et al. Gysbrecht van Aemstel: d'ondergang van syn stad en syn ballingschap: treurspel
(Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1893), vol. 1.
Metaphor and Metropolis
21
Figure 8. ‘Amsterdam geconterfeyt door Cornelis Anthoniszoon’
In: Jan Wagenaar, Amsterdam, in zyne opkomst, aanwas, geschiedenissen, voorregten, koophandel,
gebouwen, kerkenstaat, schoolen, schutterye, gilden en regeeringe (Amsterdam: Isaak Tirion, 1760-88).
As an illustration to the elaborately designed publication of the Gysbreght, Berlage
drew a map of Amsterdam highlighting in red the locations mentioned in the play
(fig. 7). Berlage drew the city at the same stage of development as Cornelis
Antoniszoon, from the same point of view, and he cites the 1544 map in so many
words as his source. In fact, however, Berlage’s version bears a far closer
resemblance to the 18th-century version in Jan Wagenaar’s great history of the city
(fig. 8). Berlage chose not to draw a meticulous representation of each and every
house and roof in the city, as had Cornelis Antoniszoon. Instead, he inserted
depictions of the main locations from the play into an abstract rendition of the
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original with overtones of current Art Nouveau graphic design. Berlage’s image
rejects careful antiquarian recreation. Rather, it displays awareness of the iconic
status that the 1544 map had attained as a marker of time. Berlage’s historical
consciousness is not positivist or antiquarian; it is evocative and emblematic in its
use of the past. What he created is a late 19th-century version of an 18th-century
version of a 16th-century representation of the city used by a 17th-century
playwright to tell the story of a 14th-century lord. What time does this visual
image of the city represent? It represents a modern palimpsest of the past. Its
simultaneity of temporal perception reveals it to be a metaphor for a city of
multiple identities. With this map, Berlage identifies the medieval city not as an
instance of Protestant or Catholic partisanship but as an exemplar of a utopian
and modern aesthetic in which the city’s emblem has been assimilated into a
perception of its multi-layered past.
Leo Simons wrote in his introduction to the gala publication of the Gysbreght that
the main character in the play remains indisputably the city of Amsterdam.
Through this publication, he surely hoped to pump new energy into the Gysbreght
tradition and invest it with modern significance, letting it once again engage with
Amsterdam’s contemporary image of itself. Two years before the first volume of
the modern Gysbreght appeared under his editorship, he had already published a
tongue-in-cheek tribute to the contemporary city, the guidebook Amsterdam in
Stukken en Brokken (Amsterdam in Bits and Pieces).6 This lovingly teasing
introduction to the city of the present day poked fun at all aspects of Amsterdam
society and mores, not least the very organisation that had commissioned the
guidebook. The illustrations by the playwright-draughtsman August Reyding
(1863-1930) set a Parisian-influenced tone of cosmopolitan sophistication visible
on the book’s cover (fig. 9). Parading on stage is the quintessential flâneur, the
man about town, vaunting a top hat tipped to his audience, the readers. The stage
set is a veritable collage of references to the city. The much reviled Naatje on the
Dam, the statue erected in honour of Dutch solidarity during the Ten-Day Revolt
of the Belgians in 1831, stands in for the Amsterdam City Maiden as resident
personification. Here she represents the Dam, the heart of the city, thus
metonymically assuming the role of Amsterdam itself. Her feminine lines are
crossed by those of the new electric wires, emblematic of the modernisation of
the city. In the background stretches the vague outline of the city’s skyline seen
6 [Leo Simons], Amsterdam in Stukken en Brokken (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1891).
Metaphor and Metropolis
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Figure 9. Book cover by August Reyding
From: [Leo Simons]. Amsterdam in Stukken en Brokken (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1891).
from the River IJ, a reference to another old visual trope that provided a totalising
view of the city, with varied towers implying the diversity and extent of the city’s
institutions. The crazy moon, a common prop in cabarets and revues, is crumbling
as the bemused flâneur gazes onto its inevitable disintegration, as time goes by.
Like Berlage’s map of Amsterdam, this image too presents a palimpsest of layered
meanings, indicating the simultaneity of urban representations. With its emphasis
on the experience of the present-day flâneur, it draws on a variety of metropolitan
metaphors and rhetorical devices that effectively convey the multiplicity that
accompanies urban change.
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The city in motion
The artist most successful in translating the movement and change of urban life
taking place in Amsterdam around 1900 was George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923).
His paintings and photographs depict a city in motion, the dynamics of street life,
and the rhythms of the pile drivers in action as new construction was taking place.
No one in the city could fail to be aware of the changes in Amsterdam during the
first decades of the 20th century. The urge to capture that forward movement had
its counterpart in the desire to record what was disappearing before it was lost
forever. A preservation movement emerged. Postcards and prints created a canon
of images depicting an idealised Amsterdam of the past, caught forever in a glow
of nostalgia.7 At the same time, Breitner’s vision of the city in development was
widely acknowledged as a genuine reflection of the city’s character. While casting
in material form the passage of time – whether the time of walking through the
streets or the time of urban growth – Breitner managed as no other contemporary
painter could to create an aesthetics of urban identity.
In 1915, the artist Jan Boon (1882-1975) published an etching depicting the
skyline of Amsterdam as observed from the roof of the Central Station. To our
eyes, it is an interesting variation on the multitude of skylines and city profiles
that for so many centuries had depicted the ship-filled harbour, with the towers of
the city rising behind them in evidence of Amsterdam’s mercantile success. Such
images had long become conventional ways of presenting a totalising view of the
city; we saw one on the cover of Stukken en Brokken. But in the eyes of the
contemporary historian of Amsterdam Hajo Brugmans (1868-1939), Boon’s
etching could be invested with much more significance, as a visual metaphor for
the city in time. Brugmans comments:
We see here Amsterdam and we see it as in [the 17th-century maps and
prints of] Bast, Saenredam, Visscher and Kip, in full activity, in energetic
action, in visible growth. There is in all of this a larger, even a higher
unity than one might expect: there is the unity of historic becoming.
7 Nancy Stieber, ‘Postcards and the Invention of Old Amsterdam around 1900’, in: Jordana Mendelson and
David Prochaska, eds., Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2010), pp. 24-41, 208-10.
Metaphor and Metropolis
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That does not imply any uniform development; our century is the time
of contradictions and heterogeneity. But are we mistaken if we claim
to see that the contradictions are becoming less sharp, that the
heterogeneity is beginning to be replaced by harmonious diversity,
which is after all a necessary element of beauty?8
Brugmans projects into this image his own perception of time unfolding. To him,
it serves as a visual conduit for the interpretation of historical development. For
Amsterdammers caught in the web of urban change, to see the city at all was to
see it in time.
In 1900 the municipal council commissioned Berlage to design the next extension
of Amsterdam. In contrast with the 19th-century project, the new one was
explicitly expected by the city fathers to respond to the aesthetic challenge of the
17th-century plan. Berlage wrote that it would be inappropriate to imitate the
three grand concentric canals literally. Rather, he extracted from their broad,
straight trajectories a principle of monumentality. This feature of the Baroque city,
he felt, reflected the higher beauty of the man-made in contrast to what he called
the picturesque beauty of medieval Amsterdam, whose irregular forms embodied
what he considered to be natural beauty. When he presented the final plan in
1915, his audience was well-prepared to receive this aesthetic approach to
reading the city image. The 17th-century canals were praised in their time in
poetry and painting for their sheer extent and their victory over nature, but not
for their beauty or aesthetics. Well into the 19th century, the 17th-century canal
system was taken as evidence of the energy and daring of the forefathers, but not
until around 1900 did people begin to see them as aesthetic masterpieces just as
worthy of national pride as paintings by Rembrandt. This nationalist re-reading of
the canals as artistic achievements on the same level of rarity and beauty, and as
worthy of respect, as the most famous Dutch paintings, influenced the conditions
under which Berlage was asked to produce a new plan that would meet the
8 ‘Wij zien hier nogmaals Amsterdam van den Ykant en wij zien het als bij Bast, bij Saenredam, bij
Visscher, en bij Kip, in volle bedrijvigheid, in opstevende actie, in zichtbaren groei. Er is in dit alles een
grootere, zelfs een hoogere eenheid dan men oppervlakkig zou verwachten; er is de eenheid van het
historisch gewordene. Dat sluit volstrekt geen gelijkmatige ontwikkeling in; onze eeuw is nu eenmaal
de tijd der tegenstellingen en der ongelijksoortigheid. Maar vergissen wij ons, zoo wij meenen te zien,
dat de tegenstellingen minder scherp worden, dat de ongelijksoortigheid plaats begint te maken voor
harmonische verscheidenheid, die toch ook weer een noodig element van schoonheid is?’ H. Brugmans,
Een nieuw profiel van Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Eisenloeffel's Kunsthandel, ca. 1915), p. 10.
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Figure 10. Cartoon about Berlage’s Plan for South Amsterdam
Johan Braakensiek, ‘Het Nieuwe Uitbreidingsplan-Zuid’, De Amsterdammer, 27 February 1916.
challenge of that beauty. A Social Democrat city councillor commented that once
built, Berlage’s southern extension would perpetuate the characteristic lines of the
great 17th-century canals.9
Johan Braakensiek celebrated Berlage’s 60th birthday with a large print dedicated
to the southern extension (fig. 10). His drawing describes the plan in rhetorical
terms his wide audience could understand, drawing as it does from a plethora of
imagery associated with Amsterdam. Berlage takes the role of the archangel
9 ‘Als dat deel eenmaal zal gebouwd zijn op de wijze, zooals wij hopen en verwachten, dat het gebouwd
zal worden, dan hebben wij hier weer een karakteristiek stuk van Amsterdam behouden; wij zullen zijn
voortgegaan in de lijnen van de groote schepping van het nieuwe Amsterdam van 1612-1648. Het zal
een stuk karakteristiek van Amsterdam zijn door de grachten, die het dooraderen, en dat zal ook in het
nieuwe zuidelijke stadsdeel het geval zijn.’ Joseph Loopuit, Municipal Council meeting of 25 October
1917, p. 1968.
Metaphor and Metropolis
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Raphael predicting the rise of Amsterdam again. Clad in academic attire, he unrolls
his plan for the perusal of the crowned personification of Amsterdam as he
gestures toward a theatrical display of the future city and addresses the
Amsterdam City Maiden with the words of prophecy spoken by Raphael to
Gijsbrecht. The most important new extension of the city at the start of the 20th
century is staged here by means of familiar urban metaphors.
Although Berlage’s plan had already been exhibited by the time this cartoon was
published, Braakensiek’s projection of the future city is chaotic, quite unlike
Berlage’s orderly and harmonious plan. We can see in it an expression of anxiety,
a fear of the unknown city yet to come, a commentary on change. The city’s future
is depicted here through tropes commonly used to represent the city in its totality:
the personification, the plan, the theatrical stage, and the allusion to the
Gysbreght. Yet these are not used to present a static city or even an already known
city. As metaphorical representations of the city, they have themselves undergone
change; they have been reinvested with meaning for the contemporary moment.
Here they serve a vision that addresses the uncertainty of the future metropolis.
Around 1900, such metaphoric images had become powerful tools to express the
character of the city through time.
Metaphor and the generic city
To speak of a city as a whole is to speak in metaphors. Metaphor enables the
comprehension of the ineffable. In this lecture, we have looked at some ways in
which metaphor operates with relation to cities. Cities have always been
composed of bricks and mortar, people and activities, processes and networks.
They are always in motion, always undergoing change – and they have always
elicited visually encapsulating rhetoric. The need to make sense of the urban
condition has given rise to a plethora of representational strategies that we in turn
can use as diagnostic tools to interpret the ways people have made sense of lived
urban experience. Around 1900 in Amsterdam, visual metaphors of the city were
being used to make time palpable. To keep their balance in the flux that engulfed
them, people turned to older urban representations: the city as a person, the city
as theatre, and the metonymic skyline. Older tropes were reinvested with meaning
to make manifest not only the physical character of the city but its temporal
character.
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There was nothing specific to Amsterdam in those representational strategies.
Other cities around 1900 had their own personifications, skylines, landmarks, and
characteristic physical attributes that were similarly activated to contend with the
challenge of growth and change. Cities in any given period have much in common
with each other, and their means of exhibiting themselves take on generic forms.
Yes, no other city but Amsterdam has Gijsbrecht van Amstel embedded in its
collective memory, but other cities have their own heroes.
I began this lecture as a defence of the ongoing legitimacy of urban experience
against the contention that cities have lost their character and identity. I have
proposed that metaphor is a way in which people grapple imaginatively with the
complexities of the metropolis. We are now witnesses to a digital revolution and
a period of globalisation whose impact on our cities still appears to be chaotic and
incomprehensible. What metaphors will emerge to express, in vivid and visceral
terms, our own experience of the cybercity? The city is still at stage centre of the
theatre where meanings are generated. Take your seats: the show never ends.
Metaphor and Metropolis
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About the author
Nancy Stieber is an architectural historian whose interest lies primarily in the
period around 1900 when the experience of modernity was being refracted
through architecture and urbanism. She construes architectural history not as the
study of great monuments and architects, but rather as a site of intellectual,
social, and cultural negotiation through which a variety of participants – including
the ordinary people who engage with the built environment - contest, explore, and
invent the meaning of space.
Nancy Stieber is an Associate Professor of Art at the College of Liberal Arts,
University of Massachusetts Boston. Her book Housing Design and Society:
Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900-1920 was co-winner of the 1999
Spiro Kostof Award for the “scholarship making the greatest contribution to our
understanding of urbanism and its relationship to architecture.” This lecture is
based on material from the book she is currently writing for the University of
Chicago Press, The Metaphorical City: Representations of Fin-de-Siècle Amsterdam.
Professor Stieber is a member of the governing council of the European
Architectural History Network and is Associate Director of the Research Center for
Urban Cultural History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She was a NIAS
Fellow in the Research Year 2007/8.
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Metaphor and Metropolis
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UHLENBECK LECTURES
Uhlenbeck Lectures are organised by the NIAS Fellows Association (NFA) to honour
the founder of the Institute, Dr. E.M. Uhlenbeck, Professor of Linguistics and
Javanese Language and Literature at Leiden University from 1950–1983 and
Chairman of the NIAS Board from 1970-1983.
Previous Uhlenbeck Lectures were:
1. 1983: E.M. Uhlenbeck
Linguistics: Neither Psychology nor Sociology
Published by NIAS, 1983
2. 1984: N. Luhmann
The ‘State’ of the Political System
Published by NIAS, 1984
3. 1985: G. Steiner
Word and Logos
Published as: Woord en Rede. Pleidooi voor
een ethische literatuurbeschouwing
by Goossens, Tricht, 1985
4. 1986: M. Fuhrmann
Die humanistische Bildung des
19. Jahrhunderts und was davon
erhaltenswert gewesen wäre
Unpublished
5. 1987: A.J.F. Köbben
Interests, Partiality and the Scholar
Published by NIAS, 1987
6. 1988: G. Modelski
Is America’s Decline Inevitable?
Published by NIAS, 1988
7. 1989: P.W. Klein
The Monetisation of the Dutch East Indies:
A Case of Changing Continuity, 1602-1942
Published by NIAS, 1989
8. 1990: M. Blaug
The Economic Value of Higher Education
Published by NIAS, 1990
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9. 1991: Esther Cohen
Gift, Payment and the Sacred in Medieval
Popular Religiosity
Published by NIAS, 1991
10. 1992: P.H. Kooijmans
Maintaining the Peace in the Shadowland
Between the Old and the New International
Order
Published by NIAS, 1992
11. 1993: Wolf Lepenies
Toleration in the New Europe: Three Tales
Published by NIAS, 1993
12. 1994: Kristofer Schipper
The Gene Bank of Culture: Reflections on the
Function of the Humanities
Published by NIAS, 1994
13. 1995: Terence J. Anderson
The Battles of Hastings: Four Stories in
Search of a Meaning
Published by NIAS, 1996
14. 1996: Maarten Brands
The Obsolescence of almost all Theories
concerning International Relations
Published by NIAS, 1997
15. 1997: Frits van Oostrom
Medieval Dutch Literature and Netherlandic
Cultural Identity
Published by NIAS, 1998
16. 1998: Fritz Stern
Five Germanies I have known
Published by NIAS, 1998
17. 1999: Dirk J. van de Kaa
The Past of Europe’s Demographic Future
Published by NIAS, 1999
18. 2000: Arend Lijphart
Democracy in the Twenty-First Century:
Can We Be Optimistic?
Published by NIAS, 2000
Metaphor and Metropolis
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19. 2001: Çiğdem Kağitçibaşi
Development of Self and Competence in
Cultural Context
Published by NIAS, 2001
20. 2002: Henk Wesseling
The Idea of an Institute for Advanced Study:
Some Reflections on Education, Science and Art
Published by NIAS, 2002
21. 2003: Christopher Brown
The Renaissance of Museums in Britain
Published by NIAS, 2003
22. 2004: Kees Schuyt
Common Sense Philosophy from Thomas Reid
to Charles Pierce: Its Relevance for Science
and Society Today
Unpublished
23. 2005: Ekkehard König
Reciprocity in Language: Cultural Concepts
and Patterns of Encoding
Published by NIAS, 2005
24. 2006: Peter Mair
Polity-Scepticism, Party Failings, and the
Challenge to European Democracy
Published by NIAS, 2006
25. 2007: Ernestine van der Wall The Enemy Within: Religion, Science, and
Modernism
Published by NIAS, 2007
26. 2008: Paul van den Broek
The Mind in Action
Cognitive Processes in Comprehending Texts
Published by NIAS, 2008
27. 2009: Anne Baker
Learning to Sign – Challenges to Theories of
Language Acquisition
Unpublished
28. 2010: Wim Blockmans
Liberties
Published by NIAS, 2010
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29. 2011: Johan Heilbron
But What About the European Union of
Scholars?
Published by NIAS, 2011
Metaphor and Metropolis
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NIAS is an institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Each
year, the Institute invites approximately 50 carefully selected scholars, both from
within and outside the Netherlands, to its centre in Wassenaar, where they are
given an opportunity to do research for up to a ten-month period. Fellows carry
out their work either as individuals or as part of one of the research theme groups.
NIAS also hosts co-sponsored fellowships. Through its conference facilities, the
Institute functions as a meeting place for workshops for which it has a special
subsidy programme. NIAS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences (KNAW).