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Retail buildings

Retail building

Dudok has designed only a small number of retail buildings in his career. These were mainly created in the fifties and sixties at the behest of project developer Johan Matser. For the assignments in the sixties it was probably mainly Dudok’s partner R.M.H. Magnée who was responsible for the development of the designs and kept Dudok’s contribution to a minimum, according to Dudok connoisseur Herman van Bergeijk.

Modern architect

Dudok’s first retail building as a private architect was the De Bijenkorf department store in Rotterdam at the head of the Coolsingel from 1930. Dudok’s design won the competition launched by the department store group. The large glass palace, the most modern department store in Europe at that time, gave a solid foundation to Dudok’s name as a modern architect, a name that was definitively established with the completion of the Raadhuis in Hilversum a year later (but that was already in 1924). was designed). The department store was demolished in 1956, after it had already suffered serious war damage. It no longer fitted in with the reconstruction plans for the center of the port city.

Department store

After the construction of De Bijenkorf, it took until the 1950s before Dudok was able to build retail buildings again. In the years after the Second World War, the process of urbanization and grand thinking began, partly due to American influences that reached our country with the Marshall aid. Johan Matser was one of the first project developers in the Netherlands. In the fifties and sixties he bought land in and around Hilversum for his own account and risk and had it built on with houses and shopping centers. Shopping centers were created in Hilversum (1959), Bussum (1957) and Diemen (1963) in collaboration with the private architectural firm of Dudok.

Fashion houses

In the center of Hilversum you will find two former fashion warehouses designed by Dudok on Kerkstraat. It concerns the (former) C&A building (1962) and diagonally opposite the former Voss fashion warehouse, now the Rabobank office (1963-66).