Van Eesteren Museum: Museum in Slotermeer, Amsterdam

★★★★★ 4.0

The Van Eesteren Museum is a museum of architecture, urban planning and design in a dark timber pavilion on the Sloterplas in Amsterdam Nieuw-West. Come to find out how the western garden suburbs were planned, then walk out of the door and see the result around you. The museum grew out of the neighbourhood. Residents set it up in 2010 in protest at the poor image of Nieuw-West, and began with walks showing how green, spacious and carefully thought out the area is. It tells the story of the town planner Cornelis van Eesteren and his team, and of the General Extension Plan of 1935, built on the idea of light, air and space. There are three parts: an outdoor museum, the indoor museum with changing exhibitions, and a 1950s museum home. More than 100 volunteers, many of them residents or retired architects and planners, guide visitors around. The pavilion, by Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten, opened here in 2017, on the very spot where Van Eesteren drew a pavilion on the map in 1939. The surrounding area has been a protected cityscape since 2008. The museum home, a ten-minute walk away, dates from 1952 and is furnished in the spirit of the Stichting Goed Wonen with design classics of the time, and you can only visit it on a guided tour. The Van Eesteren Café serves coffee, and from April to September there is a terrace overlooking the lake.