The Maagdenhuis, symbol of power and powerlessness of administrators and students
The Maagdenhuis is perhaps the most legendary building of the UvA. It is both abhorred for its impractical layout and famous for its protests. This weekend Folia zooms in on this administrative center of the UvA: the Maagdenhuis, symbol of power and powerlessness of students and administrators.
The Maagdenhuis and the recent history of the UvA are closely connected. But the stately building on the Spui was once built for an entirely different purpose. Originally, it was a Roman Catholic hostel, an orphanage for Catholic girls. This is where the building still derives its name from today.
Address: Spui 21
Built in 1780, based on a design by Abraham van der Hart.
The Maagdenhuis is a national monument.
It has belonged to the UvA since 1961.
Several staff departments work in the Maagdenhuis, including the Communication Office, the Alumni Relations Office, Academic Affairs and Legal Affairs. A few years ago, the university administration moved from the Maagdenhuis to the Roeterseiland Campus after more than 50 years.
Architectural experts have praised the building for its “highly austere forms and excellent proportions,” but also for its “severe monumentality”. It was said to be a typical eighteenth-century Amsterdam charity building “which, because of its dryness and reserve, would do little to capture the imagination”. The Maagdenhuis on the Spui, as a classic brick building from the end of the eighteenth century, can thus be called a paragon of architectural beauty.
Seven million
After the Second World War, the Maagdenhuis was sold for 2.5 million guilders to the Nationale Handelsbank, now part of ABN Amro. Then a decade later, the bank sold it. In 1961, the municipality of Amsterdam bought it to house the university's seminaries, institutes and administrative departments “for a period of 10 to 15 years.” Because the UvA was still owned by the municipality at the time – which is why it is sometimes referred to as a “municipal university” – the building was purchased on behalf of the municipality by Gijs van Hall, who was mayor at the time. According to an old paper edition of Folia, he paid a sum of “between five and seven million guilders” for it.
Until the early 1960s, the board of the UvA had always been located in the Oudemanhuispoort, rather invisible to the general public due to being surrounded by the buildings of the Kloveniersburgwal and the Oudezijds Achterburgwal. But with the Maagdenhuis, the UvA suddenly had a large, representative and visible headquarters just a short walk across the street to the Aula in the Old Lutheran Church. Scientists, and especially university administrators, replaced the bankers in the Maagdenhuis. From then on, important university and scientific decisions were made or implemented there, often with political consequences.
Protests
During the past 60 years, the Maagdenhuis has been the scene of several iconic student protests that have appealed to the imagination, of which those of 1969 and 2015 are undoubtedly the best known. Both protests had the same goal: more participation and democracy for students, destroying academic reputations and sometimes forcing administrators to resign in the process. After 1969, as a result of the protest that had been imitated elsewhere in the country, the University Administration Reform Act (WUB) was enacted. This did indeed result in more democracy.
While the Maagdenhuis had previously been a symbol of democracy, beginning at the turn of the century it gradually became a symbol of university objectivity, sobriety and efficiency, sowing the seeds for the much larger and longer protest of 2015: for no less than six weeks, imagination reigned supreme on the Spui. It led to the forced departure of College President Louise Gunning and a new attempt to put the democratization of the UvA on the map and make it sustainable. The Maagdenhuis and the UvA board members who sit (or sat) there have always witnessed - and not infrequently driven - the pendulum swing of UvA student culture.
