The Olympic Stadium by Jan Wils The Olympic Stadium by Jan Wils

In 1923, Amsterdam was elected to host the 1928 Olympic Games. The national stadium (1914) designed by Harry Elte was considered to be too small for the Olympics and Jan Wils was seen as the right man to renovate it. During the Paris games several months earlier, he had made the acquaintance of several members of the Dutch Olympic Committee as a jury member at the art competition. Wils was a passionate sports fan and already a respected architect at the age of 33. He was a member of the artistic De Stijl movement and had translated the ideas of Mondriaan and Van Doesburg into a style of architecture that was characterised by rectangular forms and flat roofs. However, he was primarily influenced by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, H.P. Berlage and M. Dudok. When he received the assignment, Wils had already completed the Papaverhof (1921); the horizontal lines, the staggered roofs and façades and the overhanging canopies in that design can also be found in the architecture of the new stadium.

The South Plan initiated by Berlage in 1917 would need a final expansion on the location where Elte's stadium stood. Amsterdam municipal council asked the owner, the Netherlands Sportpark Foundation, to hand over the building in exchange for a new location, on which a brand new stadium would be built. This was a far more attractive assignment for Wils, of course, but the casual way in which he was awarded the assignment - without a competition having been held - was not appreciated in architecture circles. In 1926, Wils presented his design. The first stone was laid on 18 May 1927 and the stadium was completed on 1 May 1928, 17 days before the opening of the Games. During the Games, the old stadium by Elte was used as a second Olympic stadium, but it was demolished in the winter of 1929 to make way for a housing development.

The stadium has two covered sections on either side: the grandstand and the marathon stand. The iron canopies feature columns that were positioned so far back that most spectators had an unobstructed view. The unsupported overhangs of eleven and seventeen metres, respectively, represented impressive feats of engineering for the time. Wils designed a slender tower for the forecourt as a contrast to the stadium's dominant horizontal lines. This Marathon Tower, topped with a huge dish on which the Olympic torch burned, became the symbol of the Games and a much-used silhouette on banners and posters.

Overall, Wils' design was well received but it was also criticised by his peers, coloured perhaps by the fact that the lack of a competition meant that they had been frozen out. Most of the criticism centred on the lack of balance between the stadium's interior and exterior. The open construction of the former made it light, airy, rigid and pragmatic, while the latter was a concrete skeleton masked with a façade of dark-coloured brick. A critic in Het Vaderland newspaper argued: 'It is too heavy, too cumbersome, even the openings are ponderous, lacking the nonchalance that is possible with modern construction materials, it has no joie de vivre.'

According to critic professor J.G. Wattjes, it was sensible of Wils not to use the most extreme forms of modernism in his design, because a building of such importance would be expected to last at least 50 years. Although architect Ben Merkelbach castigated the severe monumentality of the stadium, he also concluded that 'the stadium offers much that is important and people should not be ashamed to display this example of Dutch architecture to the world.' Architect Arthur Staal wrote in De 8 en Opbouw: 'The stadium in Amsterdam is undoubtedly the most important sports complex in the Netherlands; however, the iron roofs and floodlights, the concrete amphitheatres and brick profligacy are in complete and utter disharmony.'

The most significant show of praise for the stadium came when the art competition jury at the Games of 1928 awarded Wils a gold medal for the entire complex, meaning that his name was engraved on two marble tablets in the catacombs, alongside such Olympic legends as Bep van Klaveren and Johnny Weismuller.

All that is left of the entire complex - which once included a swimming pool, staff quarters and a building for strength sports - is the stadium, the other buildings having been demolished immediately after the Games. Facing demolition itself in 1980s, the stadium became a listed building in 1992. The subsequent renovation saw the removal of the concrete tier - an extension built in the 1930s - and the cycling track from the original design.

Jan Wils began to have his buildings photographed early in his career. Unlike his colleague J.J.P. Oud, he did not have a fixed arrangement with certain photographers. His choice of photographer seems to have been fairly arbitrary and was dictated more by a photographer's availability than the quality of his work. It is not known if Piet Zwart made many photographs for him. In the period that Zwart was a draughtsman in Wils's studio he was not yet a very experienced photographer. In any case, his name is not credited on any of the photographs.

The best photographs from this period were taken by renowned photographers. The archive contains a remarkable series of images that the photojournalist Erich Salomon took of Wils's architectural practice and a photograph that Henri Berssenbrugge took of the photography studio that Wils designed for him.

In terms of quality and quantity, the focus in the photographic collection is on the Olympic Stadium. This is not surprising, since this was Wils's first large-scale commission. The Technisch Fotobureau Gouda made a series documenting the construction, the laying of the foundation stone by Prince Hendrik and the completed building. The photo gallery on this page shows a selection from this series.