/ 17 January 2005

Put on a hard hat for the Rijksmuseum

Diggers are ripping apart ceilings that obscured a dazzling glass roof and beautiful mosaics hidden beneath modern floorboards. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, famed for its collection of Rembrandts and Vermeers, is opening its buildings to the public in the middle of a renovation.

Visitors attending the weekly Hard Hat Tour have to wear a yellow hard hat. They also get special re-enforced shoes and a fluorescent yellow builders’ vest.

”We are really on a building site and we have to take precautions,” explained a spokesperson from the construction company, wielding a list of security regulations.

Once everybody is decked out in protective gear, visitors go down into the main building of the Rijksmuseum where diggers, construction workers and rubble have taken over.

The visitor’s attention is immediately drawn to the enormous space that appears once the partition walls have been torn down and to the beautiful mosaics and frescos that were hidden behind floorboards and newly built walls in the 1950s.

”The idea is that people can see with their own eyes how we undertake the renovation of a 19th-century building,” Rijksmuseum spokesperson Boris de Munnick said.

With the exception of the New York Museum of Modern Art (Moma), no other museum of this stature has ever allowed the public to watch a renovation unfold.

Built at the end of the 19th century by Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers, the Rijksmuseum is one of the best-known museums in the world.

Its rich collection of Dutch and Flemish 17th-century masters from the so-called Golden Age of Dutch painting attracted more than a million visitors in 2003, five times more than its visitors’ tally after the building’s opening in 1885.

But its growing popularity made its renovation inescapable.

Since December 2003, the main building of the Rijksmuseum has thus become a building site under the direction of Spanish architects Antonio Ortiz and Antonio Cruz.

Their aim is to restore the light and airy feel of Cuypers’ original architecture.

”The museum had become a real maze, but the original structure was very light and bright,” said Rolf Berends, a guide at the Hard Hat Tour.

To house new paintings the museum had to create additional space. In Cuypers’s original interior courtyards, the glass ceilings were covered up and the space was transformed into exhibition rooms.

Now the courtyards are being opened up again. Visitors can see how the ceiling are being taken apart carefully, slowly letting the sunlight into the museum’s ground floor.

The original frescos commissioned by Cuypers are being renovated and in some cases redone from the original drawings.

The tour also passes through a charming library, a rectangular room covered from top to bottom in bookcases on three stories connected by spiral cast-iron staircases. In 2008, when the renovation is done, this library will be open to the public for the first time.

The museum’s entrance hall will be below ground level, comparable with the new entrance of the Louvre museum in Paris. The passage under the museum, usually alive with cyclists, pedestrians and buskers who benefit equally from the acoustics and the presence of tourists, will be maintained in the new design.

For visitors who come to see the paintings, the Rijksmuseum has opened a special wing during the renovations, showcasing the best-known paintings in the collection, such as Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and Vermeer’s Milkmaid.

But for those wanting to witness the Rijksmuseum’s escape from its cocoon of 20th-century additions, there is the weekly Hard Hat Tour. — Sapa-AFP