Tom Bellemare said:
If I remember correctly, the houses on streets like Princengracht in Amsterdam were several hundred years old. Maybe Alex can lend some incite into age and construction methods...
If you want to know I can tell something, sure. I lived for 3 years in Amsterdam, in 3 different houses close to the Prinsengracht, so I know them quite well. I always worked on the house I lived in and on some of my friends.
Most houses in the centre of Amsterdam are indeed 300 or 400 years old. I lived a while in a house from 1682 and there was one on the other side of the road from 1368. Most of them stem from the 17th century, what is called our Golden Century because it was the time of the West-Indies and the V.O.C., the first multinational. Holland was the world's most powerfull seafaring nation in those days and had trade missions all over the world. Almost all of the houses that were built in Amsterdam's centre that time were warehouses for all the trading companies and not meant to live in. You can see this in the basic construction of the houses. Funny thing is, they were taxed in that time by how wide the house was in front, so you'll find that the warehouses were all very long, sometimes up to 30 meters, but very small, only 3 or 4 meters. There is even one known building that was hardly 1 meter wide.
They say Amsterdam is built on poles, because of the muddy ground. It was basically a swamp out there before the city was built. So the foundation of every house is a bunch of long poles hammered into the ground to give it a base to built on. Then there's a stone foundation built on those poles. All the walls were made out of bricks, but because they were warehouses, they only had outer walls, no inside walls. The floors were supported by very thick wooden beams, placed very close together and anchored to the sides in the walls. And then a layer of thick planks over them to make up the floors. The floors were made so strong to support all the goods that had to be stored there. In the picture below you can see how heavy and close together the beams were placed.
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The warehouses were built pretty high for that time, going up to 4 or 5 levels with a slanted wooden roof on top with baked roof tiles. The houses were always mainly built out of stone. With the
Great Fire of London still in mind, which destroyed 90% of London, wooden houses were avoided, if not entirely forbidden in most European cities.
Later on, in the 19th and 20th century as Amsterdam grew, most economic activity was redirect to the outskirts and planned harbours and slowly but surely all warehouses were converted into normal houses, mostly for those who had some money to burn. Today that inner circle of Amsterdam is one of Europe's most expensive places to live. Now it's littered with lawyers, financial consultancy agents, docters and embassies.
The picture below nicely illustrates what different states of houses you can find in Amsterdam. On the far right there is a house that still looks on the outside as an original warehouse, with all the doors on every floor and a rope crane block on top. Then next to that a well maintained buildings that was converted to an expensive residents house. In the middle you can see a house that is partially crooked to one side. You will find a lot of crooked houses like that in Amsterdam. Despite all the poles Amsterdam was built on, still a lot of houses sunk away and became crooked. As a remedy, as you can see on the two left most houses, they added a network of wooden beams on the outside to prevent the house from crumbling entirely. All bolted btw.
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I hope this satisfies your curiosity a bit Tom. [smile]
