Amsterdam offers a wealth of clas­sical mod­ern archi­tec­ture. Espe­cially the south of the city is a true open-air museum of mod­ern­ist archi­tec­ture, from Ber­lage’s Plan Zuid to Van Eyck’s orphanage.

At the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury, H.P. Ber­lage was appoin­ted by the Amsterdam city coun­cil to design a plan for a city exten­sion in the south of the city. Most build­ings were designed by archi­tects of the expres­sion­ist Amsterdam School, but there are also sev­eral examples of func­tion­al­ist archi­tec­ture – most prom­in­ently the Open Air School by Duiker. In the 1950s, Struc­tur­al­ism took over from Func­tion­al­ism in the Neth­er­lands. With his design for an orphan­age which could accom­mod­ate 125 chil­dren, Aldo van Eyck cre­ated an archi­tec­tural icon in 1960.