Minervalaan Amsterdam, part 1

We are currently working on a very interesting project at the Minervalaan in Amsterdam: eight weathered tuff statuettes are to be reconstructed and copied in new limestone.

Building sculptures on the Minervalaan

On the buildings on the Minervalaan, and by the way in the entire neighborhood around this street, a lot of building sculpture can be found. It was usually carved on the spot by a relatively small group of sculptors, including Anton Rädecker, Jaap Kaas and Hildo Krop. The sculptures were all placed there at the time of construction, during the height of the Amsterdam School building style, around the years 1920, 1930. The work was mostly carried out in French limestone (mostly Euville), in German tuff stone, Muschelkalk limestone or sandstone, or in Bavarian granite. Very unfortunate that this philosophy on building is currently hardly ever imitated anymore.

Ten weathered statues

The project that it's all about sits at the four corners of the intersection between the Minervalaan and Gerrit van der Veenlaan. Ten sculptures have been installed at each of these four street corners. They were designed and made by Anton Rädecker and Jaap Kaas. The themes are, for example, aldermen, architects, workers, seasons and Fauns playing music.

The sculptures were carved in Ettringer and Weiberner tuff, but after a century of weather and wind and especially leaking water drains, the works are in dire need of restoration. Two of them are still good and will be preserved: the Reaper and the Apple Picker (Summer and Autumn).

Themes

We are currently working on the northwest corner. On the corner of number 28/30 are four statues of women who depict the four seasons, four working men who highlight the work in those seasons, and two fauns with a goat and a deer. The women are just standing being graceful and depict the seasons in four stages of life: a maiden with flowers, for Spring, a young woman for Summer, with ears of corn and flowers, a more mature woman for Autumn, with grapes and apples, and an old woman in a cloak, for Winter. On the inside we see the men, working hard: a Man sowing, for Spring, a Man with a sickle, mowing for Summer, a man picking apples for Autumn and a man digging for Winter. Both of the outer sides are covered by a faun as a sign for Nature: a thoughtful Faun with a goat on the left and a pan flute playing Faun with a deer on the right.

Gallery: The eight sculptures that are to be replaced from the northwest corner

Jaap Kaas

At the time these eight statues were all made by Jaap Kaas, an Amsterdam sculptor. He is best known for his striking animal portraits of, for example, the baboons in the Artis Zoo. For the project on the Minervalaan, he made a series of designs in clay and then cast plaster models from it. We know this because one of these plaster casts can still be found in Amsterdam School Museum De Dageraad. You can also see quite well that he used to work meticulously from a maquette because on the other side of the street, on the North East Corner, exactly the same sculptures can be found. That was a big help for us during the reconstruction phase!

He must have taken these plaster casts from his studio to the Minervalaan and then carved the figurines from a scaffolding, on the spot .

Traces of carving

I can say that because four statues have been carved on the inside of the underpass and a fraction of the original block is still in place over their heads. During the dismantling it turned out that this vulnerable layer of tuff is only 1 centimeter thick: he could never have carved this in his studio and then installed it without breaking it off. The only reason that such a thin slice has been left above the heads of the working men, is that he carved it on the spot and has adjusted the upper tuff layer to the existing stucco ceiling. Other, smaller, details also indicate carving in situ.

Tuff

The reason that we are involved in this project on the Minervalaan is that these important building sculptures have been exposed to strong weathering for decades. A lot of repair work has been done on them since at least the 1960s and on more recent photos can be seen that a lot of loss of details has occurred even in the last ten years. At the bottom of the pillars we could also notice, during a second visit to the building just a couple of weeks later, that all kinds of new flakes had come loose in those few weeks.

Patching them up won't help

There have been discussions for a long time about the condition of the sculptures and all kinds of solutions have been put forward. But what it finally comes down to is clear as day: Patching them up is not going to help anymore. With these kinds of tuffstones, the weathered surface is cracking and falls off, and deeper inside the crack formation continues . Now I have to say that in Ettringer tuff this process is more serious than Weiberner tuff, which can handle internal tensions better. If you want to read more about this, I heartily recommend my article about it the weathering of tuff on this blog.

Preservation of information

The sculptures of the Minervalaan have also been painted quite a few times in the past, including with waterproof latex paint, and also been repaired with a hard cement mortar. So if you'd just patch these kinds of sculptures up a bit, it would really just be a cosmetic approach. The surface layer of the sulpture, with old and new mortar repairs and all, will come down at some point. And then the problem will be even bigger: all the information that could still be traced from the sculpture has now been completely lost. This would make it increasingly difficult in the future to make a well-founded reconstruction of what has been there. And then we haven't even talked about the structural strength of these building blocks. For this reason, it was ultimately decided to replace the sculptures with copies in new stone.

Read more in Part 2 about this project