The NAI is July 3 to a exhibition on the work of architect AF Aalbers. Aalbers, born in Rotterdam, worked from 1924 to 1930 and from 1946 to 1961 in the Netherlands, in the intervening period (1930-1942) he worked in the Dutch East Indies. It was his Indian work Dorothee Segaar, curator and co-author of the same name, in 1977 inspired an investigation into the work of Aalbers. The lack of an archive was, however, that Segaar as a true Miss Marple had to work. Another closet corrects the cry.
DENIS bank (De Nederlandsche first Indian Sparkasse), Braga, Bandung Jl (1935).
Armed with a keen eye to “Aalbers one”, a camera, an address book with names of former employees and residents and by technical illustrators, she asked over the years a work list together of 65 works: 22 Dutch, one Belgian Congolese (design competition) and 42 Indian. Most of the designs for the Dutch East Indies (27) was achieved in Bandung. This town, as envisaged in 1916 as the new home of central government in the Dutch East Indies, was the seat of the agency founded in 1931 been “Aalbers and De Waal, architects’.
Segaar The amount of material collected over the years resulted in a modest but interesting, beautifully furnished exhibition. Reconstruction Drawings, photographs, original design sketches (published by Aalbers during his internment time) and an original movie about the construction of the Hotel Savoy Homann (1938) create a plain but good picture of both the Dutch and the Indian work Aalbers. To work to the Indian place in the contemporary context to the beginning of the exhibition “The Tropics Holland Style. A documentary about Dutch architecture in Indonesia from .1900 to 1940 “by director Ike Bertels see.
Hotel Savoy Homann
The focus of the exhibition is Aalbers’ work from his Indian period. This is possible due to the fact that his Indian work more expressive than his Dutch work. The truth Aalbers case in India as an architect had acquired good reputation among clients and his position in the Netherlands was significantly less prominent.
The Indian design features beside the prevailing tropical characteristics (large roof overhangs, whitewashed walls) by Aalbers some remarkable elements. In particular buildings for (semi-) commercial clients stand out by rounded corners, gently undulating facade lines, slender tower elements and flat roofs – a style in Bandung is now called “Streamline Art Deco ‘Bandung and the nickname” Art Deco City “constituted. Aalbers’ non-commercial construction contracts were generally less expresionistisch although one roof here and there sometimes from the mainstream daktype to depart.
Although the exhibition in one of the corners of the NAI is exhibited (second floor) and the signage is unclear to say the least, is to be hoped that BONAS Foundation (bibliographies and Oeuvre lists of Dutch Architects and Urban Designers) are also in the near future efforts to present these gems as in general and an almost forgotten part of the Dutch architecture, the work in the Netherlands, trained architects and urban planners in the first half of the twentieth century in the Dutch East Indies designed, in particular.
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