Forget the tour boats through the canals – whoever is in Amsterdam in the coming months can safely go to the canal museum. There you can see an exhibition about the swimming, flying and crawling residents of the canal belt until the end of November. In a seventeenth-century building you will become acquainted with outdoor species such as the Quaggamossel and the Riverdierpad and Passen usual suspects Like the collar parakeet and the brown rat.
The building on the Herengracht was designed in 1663 on behalf of the merchant Karel Gerards by Philip Vingboons – a well -known architect who also designed the famous Cromhouthuizen further down the canal. Nowadays the house serves as a mini-museum: you can attend a multimedia performance, view various style rooms and visit an ever-changing exhibition-now over the canal biodiversity.
Brown rat
That combination between canal belt interior and nature is bearing fruit. The 3D-printed concrete ‘fish hotel’ forms a nice contrast with the classic chandelier above, a stuffed heron is gracefully next to an antique mirror. Because of those human influences you automatically start thinking about the sometimes intimate way in which we live together with other species in the city.
In that respect, the various audio interviews, including those with Leiden biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra, are also interesting. He investigated from which materials meadow nests were structured and came across plastic cups and mouth caps, among other things. Man as the dirtiest kind of the city. The brown rat, which is often so taunted, turns out to be much nicer than expected.
The exhibition regularly invites introspection. Repeatedly you are presented with philosophical questions on the basis of animal facts: a mussel filters water a day, when did you last something big? Those who do not feel like it can also just delve into the life of the Knobbelzwaan (including trip to art history) or about the history of the eel riot: the illustrious popular uprising in the Amsterdam Jordaan who originated in 1886 after a game of ‘eel pulling’.
Clear
The photo portraits of Amsterdam pets in the entrance hall are also worth it – it could have been more of it. In any case, the subject lends itself to a larger exhibition, but it is great how the canal museum knows how to hold the attention of visitors for a long time. Precisely because the scale is well -arranged, you look at each part extra well. For example, those who still need more after that can visit the nearby Taxidermiemuseum Artzoo. There too (stuffed) nature goes hand in hand with seventeenth-century architecture.
And of course it is worthwhile to walk around the real canals after the museum visit: you suddenly view them with different eyes.
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