Ode to Jakoba Mulder | Ode to Jakoba Mulder

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Geachte juffrouw Mulder, beste Jakoba,

Op 7 september 2017 zag ik u voor het eerst. Geschilderd door Piet den Ouden. Zittend aan uw bureau. Sigaret in de asbak. Plattegrond van het Amsterdamse Bos aan de muur, Spaarnwoude op tafel, Buitenveldert met rode magneetjes aan de muur. Uw portret hing in ons Collectiecentrum, het depot van het Amsterdam Museum. En burgemeester Eberhard van der Laan besloot toen en daar, dat u een plaats zou krijgen in de tentoonstelling De Mooiste Stad – de tentoonstelling waarvan hij gastconservator was.

That I had not met you before is crazy. You may be much older than I am, but you were still alive when I was studying and immersing myself in the housing architecture of Amsterdam New West. I could well have visited you to personally record your views on the western garden cities, but I had overlooked you. Only twice did I type your name in my thesis on the garden cities. 'Mulder'. I wrote about Cornelis van Eesteren, Merkelbach and Scheffer and turned out to have a blind spot for the influence of Jakoba Mulder, the woman who, from the age of 30, was an architect and urban planner at the Public Works Department of Amsterdam; from 1952-1965 as head.

Your influence on post-war Amsterdam was enormous. You were involved in the Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan, you built in Nieuw-West and Buitenveldert, you designed the Amsterdamse Bos and Spaarnwoude, and you stood at the cradle of the Bijlmermeer (with which, incidentally, you were not satisfied). I should have known you, but where I highlighted the vision and design power of men, I passed you by. And for that I apologize. Because you are worth knowing. You deserve an ode. And fortunately this is not the first, because with a square, a statue, an exhibition, a dissertation and several publications, justice is now being done to your value to Amsterdam.

Since that Thursday in 2017, you were in my life. Almost daily. Your portrait moved from the Collection Center in North to the Civic Orphanage on Kalverstraat. I saw you almost daily and started to tutor you. For me, you became Jakoba. And very occasionally Ko, as your colleagues called you. Ir. Jakoba Helena (Ko) Mulder (1900-1988), today I write you a letter. Or rather, I am completing the letter I started weeks ago. And as I type the date, I realize that today is your dying day, November 5, 36 years ago. I raise a glass to you and reminisce.

In the museum

For Mayor Van de Laan it was clear: New West had to have a place in his exhibition The Most Beautiful City, and your portrait was part of it. Some 150,000 people saw The Most Beautiful City between June 16 and November 4, 2018, but visitors in the last month saw your portrait in copy. Because in between, you moved to another exhibition in our museum: 1001 Women in the 20th Century, by guest curator Els Kloek and designer Irma Boom - two women who, by the way, also deserve a tribute. There you were on view from October 4, 2018 to March 10, 2019.

I had let my colleagues know that as far as I was concerned, you could never return to the depot. And so it happened that you came to my study in March 2019. The beautiful portrait in my immediate vicinity. Always something new to see and always the subject of conversation. Whether those conversations were about current developments in Amsterdam, about the lack of women's stories in our history, about New West or the Bosbaan, or about the fact that you were from the same year of birth as my grandmother - the old Judikje. Both from March 1900. Your portrait, Jakoba, was a conversation piece.

You hung there for just a year when we had a historic moment. March 12, 2020. You were there when we had to decide, to our dismay, that the museum would be closed to the public starting March 13. Corona. While almost everyone was working from home, I was still in our Civic Orphanage. From one moment to the next, we were meeting digitally and I positioned my computer screen so that you were my background. You were watching and remained a topic of conversation. Even in those now already unimaginable years when almost everyone worked from home and chats at the coffee machine were sorely missed.

The museum reopened and you were there when the Golden Coach was hoisted over the roof into the girls' courtyard in June 2021. The closing of this exhibition in late February 2022 ushered in a new era. We closed the Civil Orphanage and prepared for the major renovation for which we received the permit later that year. And at the same time, we opened our temporary housing on the Amstel, in the building of H'ART Museum, then still called Hermitage. My study moved to Herengracht 603, but you did not move with it. You were included, quite rightly, in the semi-permanent exhibition Panorama Amsterdam, where your portrait, your drawing board and a maquette of Amsterdam with the General Expansion Plan are on display.

With these objects we tell the story of the post-war western garden cities, but also that of you, Jakoba. Because you helped determine what Amsterdam looks like today. I think highly of you. And I am glad that more and more is being published about you: the country's first female urban planner. Never to be forgotten.

Judikje Kiers