UvA buildings | An auditorium in the Oude Lutherse Kerk: A marriage between church and university
The Oude Lutherse Kerk (Old Lutheran Church) is closely linked to the history of the University of Amsterdam. Long before the UvA leased the Oude Lutherse Kerk as its aula in 1961, it provided space for UvA inaugural lectures, celebrations, and PhD ceremonies. “The place invites academic theater.”
It was just after World War II. The University of Amsterdam was then located exclusively in the Oudemanhuispoort, with a few smaller buildings in the city center - and it was bursting at the seams. There was an urgent need for “…a much larger auditorium, a reception room, a senate chamber, and a coffee room,” says the article entitled “We are spilling out of the gate” from a 1954 issue of Folia.
The Evangelical Lutheran Congregation, on the other hand, saw an exodus from its churches in Amsterdam’s inner city during the same period. An offer from the university in 1961 to rent the church on weekdays and provide for its upkeep was accepted.
Yet the paths of the university and the Old Lutheran Church crossed much earlier in history. Coincidentally, the university and the church date back almost to the same year. The Athenaeum Illustre, the predecessor of the UvA, saw the light of day on January 8th, 1632, while on Christmas Day 1633, the Oude Lutherse Kerk was inaugurated as the first Lutheran church in Amsterdam.
The university soon conceived the idea to approach the church. As early as the seventeenth century professors held their inaugural lectures there, and in 1832 the Athenaeum Illustre celebrated its bicentennial there.
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Why the university had its eye on the Old Lutheran Church is not clear. However, the church does boast particularly good acoustics and three impressive galleries supported on Tuscan, Doric, and Ionic pillars overlooking a stage with a pulpit from 1640.
“This place invites more academic theater than the more intimate Agnietenkapel,” says Annelies Dijkstra, who has been responsible for all academic ceremonies at the UvA since 2004 as beadle and head of the department in the Rector’s Office. “For example, the celebrations like the opening of the Academic Year and the Dies Natalis at which all professors appear in togas.”
Yet around the turn of the century, there was again a lack of space in the Aula. All academic ceremonies, PhD ceremonies, orations, farewell lectures and also graduation ceremonies and congress openings took place there. So starting in 2007, the bulk of the PhD ceremonies was moved to the smaller Agnietenkapel, relieving the pressure on the Aula considerably. Some 80 percent of the nearly 600 PhD ceremonies at the UvA now take place there each year.
The Escher Building
The Old Lutheran Church was built on a site where seven warehouses used to stand. For this reason, the floor plan of the church has an unusual shape, and climbing up to the galleries allows the visitor the opportunity to admire a curious courtyard. The building is also connected via the toga dressing room to the academic center SPUI25 and via the vicarage parallel to the Aula to the Doelenzaal in the University Library. Dijkstra says: “I also call it the Escher Building. If you’re not careful, you can get completely lost.”
By 1925, the foundation had its best days behind it and the church began to sink. The contractor A. A. Kok repaired the foundation and simultaneously removed the graves that had been under the church floor up to that point. At the beginning of the eighties, it was the roof that needed attention since it was in danger of collapsing due to wood rot. The contractor J. Kneppers managed to restore it by lifting the entire roof, complete with support beams, and replaced the supporting columns entirely. During that operation, floor heating was also installed on behalf of the UvA and the pews were replaced with folding chairs with a built-in writing desk. But the church was never completely straight, which can still be clearly seen in the undulating galleries. Also, on the advice of Monumentenzorg (the Department for the Preservation of Monuments), the church was restored to the colors of 1774 during that restoration: gray Bentheimer sandstone for the pillars and woodwork, and Berlin blue for the roof.
In addition, some rooms were joined to make room for the interior of the Tetterode Library. That library, formerly located on the Da Costakade, houses one of the largest typographical collections in Europe of the typesetters of Nicolaas Tetterode. It consists of books, periodicals, portraits, and prints, as well as typeproofs and lead typesetters, and is now forms part of the Special Collections of the Allard Pierson.
The rector’s chair
Next to the Tetterode Library is the Senate Room, the room where the doctoral committee makes its final judgment and which is still used by the Evangelical Lutheran Church as a Wedding Hall. The room is lined with portraits of mostly old, gray-haired men who have been both president of the Board of Trustees and Rector of the university, two positions that are no longer combined at the UvA.
Eye-catching in the Senate Hall is the rector’s chair, a wooden chair with embroidery that the UvA once received as a gift from the Amsterdamsch Studenten Corps. In fact, the A.S.C. / A.V.S.V. regularly visited the Oude Lutherse Kerk in the 1960s, using it on the occasion of celebrations and for concluding hazing ceremonies. Mrs. C. E. Blankevoort-van Zadel, who was the sexton in the Lutheran Church between 1964 and 1975, tells about it in the book The Lutherans in Amsterdam (1588-1988). “[The hazing] then happened on Saturday - of course, we were not there, but afterwards we found all kinds of things in the wedding hall, and sometimes a lot of garbage.”
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During the 1969 occupation of the Maagdenhuis, the sexton encountered sleeping students in the hallways and in the Wedding Hall one Sunday morning. “They had made a gangway one story up between our building and the Maagdenhuis, across Handboog Street. When we came for church service, the students would leave over that plank until the service was over. They left the church intact as far as I remember.”
A portrait in the Senate Hall serves as a reminder of that Maagdenhuis occupation. Pictured in the foreground is Dymph van den Boom, the only female rector in the Senate Hall, in the background are the students during the 2015 Maagdenhuis occupation.
“There are always questions about that portrait,” Dijkstra says. “It makes one wonder that a rector who herself was part of the university administration that the protests were against would portray herself with the occupations. At the same time, she did manage to do something that always gives food for thought.”
Soon Van den Boom will no longer be the only woman in the Senate hall. Outgoing board president Geert ten Dam, who also held the rectorship for a short time before the arrival of Peter-Paul Verbeek, will join her.
Extended
Although the auditorium in the Oude Lutherse Kerk was once intended to be temporary, it looks like the UvA will be around for a while. Grand plans to dispose of all the buildings on Het Singel and re-center the UvA in the university district with a new auditorium in the Oudemanhuispoort proved too expensive in 2021. The contract with the Lutherans was then extended again for five years until 2026. “And it will probably be extended again after that,” Dijkstra believes. “If there were any other plans, we would have known by now.”
