Note 508 — CHAPTER 23 LATER WORK OF THE LEADERS OF THE SECOND GENERATION

Thanks to the continuance in the early post-war years of the reaction of the thirties, the buildings at the south end of the Coolsingel appear to present a curious inversion of chronology. While Dudok’s Bijenkorf Department Store of 1929-30, now demolished to open the view to the harbour, was characteristic of the ambiguity of much of his work, this ‘baby skyscraper’ of 1939-40 and also the contiguous Exchange by J. F. Staal (1879-1940), designed in 1929 and built in the thirties, appear much more ‘modern’ to mid-century eyes than the first big banks and so forth rebuilt after the war—these look as if they had been designed at least a 469generation ago. But the wave of reaction soon ran its course; the Lijnbaan of 1953-4, a complete shopping street by van den Broek & Bakema running parallel to the Coolsingel, if not the new Bijenkorf by Breuer of 1955-7, was among the most advanced projects carried out anywhere in the mid fifties.