The Het Scheep Vaart Museum is Amsterdam's maritime and nautical history museum. As Amsterdam is a port city, there is a rich history of maritme related activity, from the use of the port as an international goods exchange, to a place where people live, to a home to marine animals and deep sea divers. As someone who is greatly interested in the sea, and being somewhere where the coast so clearly and directly influences the town, I was very curious to learn about Amsterdam's nautical history, and hopefully develop a better understanding of the city itself. What I found when I went to the exhibit, however, was that I was just as fascinated by the museum building itself as with the information it was displaying.
The museum tackles an interesting challenge-- taking an expanse of national history and making it not only relevant to the role maritime activities play in the town today, but also interesting to an international population of all ages. The most striking part of the museum is the building it is placed in. Previously a former naval storehouse, the large white stone facility is a four story square structure which surrounds and protects a large courtyard in the exact center. In order to prepare the building to become the museum the inside of each wing was retrofitted with brand new floors and modern stairways of glass and metal. This creates a striking yet surprisingly harmonious contrast between the aged building and its sleek interiors. This visual combination allows the visitor to recreate the same connection between the history that the museum discusses and its relevance to the current maritime state and activities of Amsterdam. This is a very successful way of keeping visitors engaged in the material, and it also makes the space of the museum itself a very pleasant place to be. The courtyard is also retrofitted with a large glass and steel skylight based on the design of a compass rose so that, even when not inside the building, the visitor gets a beautiful modern view contrast to the traditional exterior.
The exhibits themselves also efficiently use modern design to make the display of ancient artifacts and information engaging and relevant. Most historical artifacts were placed in cases with glass on all sides, and oftentimes even suspended within the case so that the bottom of the object was also visible. As someone who is fascinated by tools and machinery, I was especially grateful for this extra visibility in the exhibition of old sailing compasses and diving tanks and gears. I was able to examine all of the different parts of each mechanism and figure out exactly how the technology worked. The museum provided a rich variety of historical artifacts, from old maps and globes, to glassware used on the boats, to original wooden statues from the boats' prows. There were also a selection of drawings, videos, and paintings which captured the people and the machinery involved in Amsterdam's maritime history. In the rooms where paintings of old ships and ocean scenes were displayed, the museum was also fitted with lights whose direction varied so that the viewer's eyes were drawn to different details of the paintings that might previously have gone unnoticed. For example, on one painting that was about four feet wide and a couple feet tall, the lights would help the viewer see the men working on the dock in one corner, and then move to see a fire burning down a part of a ship on the horizon in the other. As the paintings were all historically focused-- and many of them extremely realistic-- this provided even further insight into the small but important parts of maritime activities at the time they were painted.
Although I was greatly interested in the history of the ocean and its effects on Amsterdam, I ended up spending a large part of my time marveling at the clear thought and aesthetic attention that went into every detail of the museum. The Het Scheep Vaart Museum was able to create an open yet exciting presentation for any age while still conveying enormous amounts of Amsterdam's history to people from all over the world. This is an incredibly difficult task for museums to accomplish, especially one who's topic is rather specialized. I would recommend the Het Scheep Vaart Museum to lovers of both the sea and architecture because the building itself was as impressive as its contents.
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