Melle van Maanen
2024

The Amsterdam School is famous for its expressive brick architecture and richly decorated interiors. In the early the twentieth century, the Amsterdam School caused a stir by creating housing blocks and public works that were built in the city expansions in the Netherlands.

But what sources of inspiration informed these wonderous designs? Although the Amsterdam School is considered to be genuine Dutch design, it was in fact strongly interwoven with Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies. The book Indonesia and the Amsterdam School: When Culture Crosses the Ocean shows how Indonesian art and building forms have shaped the Amsterdam School. In this way, the book brings together architectural and design history with colonial history. 

The contributions to the book were written by both Dutch and Indonesian authors in the form of articles, essays and interviews. These discuss shared design histories in the form of buildings, objects, designers and developments or reflect on them from a contemporary perspective. Doing so, the book aims to contribute to a dialogue about the shared colonial past and to stimulate mutual understanding in both the Netherlands and Indonesia. It is for this reason, with the support of the Philippus Corts Fund, that the book that was originally published in English has been translated into Indonesian as Indonesia dan Amsterdam School: Ketika Budaya Melintasi Samudra.

Melle van Maanen is curator at Museum Het Schip, the museum for the Amsterdam School movement of architecture and applied arts and public housing in Amsterdam. In 2022-2023, he created the exhibition Indonesia and the Amsterdam School in collaboration with Anita Halim Lim and Gadis Fitriana Putri. In 2024-2025, this exhibition was shown in an adapted form at the Erasmus Huis in Jakarta. Melle also works as a historical researcher at the Vrije Universiteit within the Global Political History research group. In this role, he does research on the Indonesian War of Independence with Prof. Dr. Susie Protschky, focusing on photography, oral history and memory. He publishes reviews in The Dutch Review of Books, among others. Melle studied Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. For his studies in Leiden, he did an internship at the KITLV-KNAW in 2021-2022.