On an August afternoon many years ago, I went to Hilversum to see its famous Town Hall, Dudok’s masterpiece.
Willem Marinus Dudok, the greatest exponent of Dutch neo-plasticism and a follower of Wright, had studied as an engineer in a military academy, then became chief architect of that city, leaving behind exemplary works which inspired, among others, Michelucci and the Tuscan Group for the most beautiful parts of the Florence Railway Station.
The place is quiet and silent, and very green. In a very large pool of water on the front of the City Hall the sky and the architecture are reflected in a typically Dutch luminosity. I walk along the pool, I pass through a long arcade that looks like a modern stoà, arrive at the entrance and there I stop, thinking that I should ask someone for permission to visit. But there is no one. A little embarrassed, I cautiously walk in: very clean spaces, of a sober and accurate elegance, where every detail is a lesson in architecture.
On the right, the main staircase invites me to go up. I come to a vestibule, beyond which I imagine the Council Chamber must be located. Given the absolute silence, I venture to open a door: I see a large deserted room, with all the furnishings in place, an elegant space where everything is still, and even time seems to pause.
But to the right there is something that pulses: it’s the reflections of the outdoor pool that are projected on the wall behind the seats of the council, drawing a lively and iridescent dance. That play of light animates the whole space, and I try to imagine it when it shows up during some council meeting: the effect must be really nice.
For me, in that moment, the effect is to drag my thoughts far away: water, earth, light, time… I think of the flowing waters that shape the landscapes, of the ancients who used water to measure the hours, of the admirable hydraulic works of these ‘low lands’, and then of the light of their immense sky crossed by clouds, the same sky of Ruisdael’s landscapes… Holland, land stolen from the sea, surprises you by making you feel everywhere in contact with the primary elements of Creation, even here in this composed and silent council room.
A long time later, leafing through a book on Dudok, I think back to these suggestions and I wonder if Dudok had somehow foreseen that play of reflections. I look at the drawings of the project and find some clues: the pool was brought close to the facade of the City Hall, just under the windows, and there horizontal water jets ripple the surface of the pool, while inside, choosing a transversal arrangement of the seats, and not a longitudinal one as normal, the main wall of the room is brought closer to the windows; and that wall was also left empty of emblems or banners, as it would have been obvious to place on it.
I’m inclined to say yes.
Then it occurs to me that, in the very same years in which the Town Hall was built, the Afsluitdijk was also being constructed, that is the colossal dam on the North Sea made to close the Zuiderzee basin and take new land from the sea. Thirty-two kilometers of granite brought from Sweden, something like a dozen pyramids of Cheops.
It is not rhetorical to say that that was a historic moment in the eternal confrontation of the Dutch people with the waters. And perhaps Dudok, in that context, might have thought of placing a symbol of the Water Element in the city council room of Hilversum, a city so close to those lands reclaimed from the sea. But not just any symbol: a living, breathing symbol, a kind of ‘hydrophany’….
Maybe?
