("Shipwarehouse", right?)

The building of this cooperative commerical building called the Scheepvaarthuis (Shipping House) in Amsterdam took three or four architects, six shipping companies as clients, and better than 15 years. The major commission of Johan van der Mey, who also served as Amsterdam's civic aesthetic consultant. Amsterdam was the first modern city to establish and enforce a building code, and they hired van der Mey specifically to take care of aesthetic matters.

In 1905 Amsterdam was the first city in the world to impose a building code, and van der Mey was appointed its Aesthetics Czar before he was 30. As its first civic building artist, he developed the facade for the 1912 Palm House at the Hortus Bontanicus, among other buildings.

The Scheepvaarthuis (Shipping House), is considered the first building of what became the Amsterdam School for a couple of decades. It is first and last a collaborative effort. Van der Mey was assisted by his colleagues Michel de Klerk (who went on to become the prolific leading figure in the Amsterdam School) and Piet Kramer, and another architect named A.D.N. van Gen handled the engineering, leaving van der Mey free to coordinate the extensive symbolic art and sculptural program, inside and outside. Much of the sculpture is the work of Hildo Krop and H.A. van den Eijnde, but a large group of well-known artists contributed.

Brick construction with complicated masonry, it has traditional massing and is roughly comparable to the Glasgow Art School or the Municipal House in Prague. All this integration of an elaborate scheme of building elements (decorative masonry, art glass, wrought ironwork, spatial grammar, and especially figurative sculpture) embodies and expresses the identity of the building. The aim was to create a seemless architectural experience, directed towards the users of the building, and carrying social meaning and emotional content. That commanding figure on the roof, Leninesque from this angle, is the architect's father.