Introduction

Amsterdam offers different groups of enthusiasts many distinct itineraries. Certainly, the average tourist trajectory along the canals differs from the pilgrimage made by architecture aficionados to Berlage's Plan Zuid. What is more, the visitor's gaze has changed over the course of time, converging with and responding to other viewing practices. This chapter will investigate the multifaceted, everchanging image of Amsterdam architecture and its reception by disparate audiences, and it will re-examine the relationship between architectural images – i.e., two-dimensional visual representations of parts of the city and its buildings – and the actual sites. In doing so, the focus will be on eighteenth-century representations of the city, and more specifically on how certain types of printed sources have shaped our reading of the city and its forms and continue to do so into the present, influencing how we imagine and experience Amsterdam today under conditions which on the face of it may seem so different. As I will argue, the way in which Amsterdam appears in present-day ‘global heritage’ discourse is not without precedent and can be related to a long history of conceptualizations of the seventeenth-century inner-city canal ring, the grachtengordel. Reconsidering earlier expressions of interest in – and appreciation for – specific features of Amsterdam architecture and urban design will clarify their meaning and appeal in the present; among others, it will allow us to place the recent elevation of the grachtengordel to ‘UNESCO world heritage’ status (in 2010) in a long-term perspective, emphasizing how its presentation of the canal belt as a unified whole was anticipated in eighteenth-century visual discourse.

The international architectural tourist comes to Amsterdam, not for the historical inner city, but to see the extraordinary work of the architects of the early twentieth century. In the chronology of international surveys of urban architecture and its history, references to the Netherlands often do not crop up until the early twentieth century. H. P. Berlage is mentioned as an architect or urban designer, followed by the Amsterdam School architects of a later generation such as Michel de Klerk and modernists such as J. J. P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld.