traveldk.com

The Schreierstoren (Tower of Tears) is one of Amsterdam’s oldest buildings – a surviving fragment of the medieval city wall.

One of two remaining wood-fronted houses in Amsterdam (see Het Houten Huis), In’t Aepjen was built in 1550 as a sailors’ hostel, and is now a bar. The name means “In the monkeys”: when sailors couldn’t pay, they would barter – sometimes with pet monkeys (see In 't Aepjen).

Seen from the courtyard, the impressive red-brick façade, with its ornate entrance and stonedressed windows, was the height of corporate fashion. Headquarters of the once mighty Dutch East India Company (VOC), it was built in 1605, probably by Hendrick de Keyser, and is now part of Amsterdam University. The 17th-century meeting room of the VOC lords has been restored.

If you are lucky, you might see the vast, streamlined sails of this 18th-century corn mill creak into motion. Built in 1725, the whole octagonal structure was painstakingly moved to its present site in 1814.

Named after the Portuguese merchant Isaac de Pinto, who paid an exorbitant 30,000 guilders for it in 1651, the building has an impressive Italianate façade and ceiling paintings by Jacob de Wit.

Justus Vingboons’ grandiose façade with false middle windows (1662) concealed the two separate homes of the powerful Trip brothers – arms dealers, hence the pair of chimneys resembling cannons.

The city of New York was conceived in the Dutch West India Company building, and Pieter Stuyvesant’s statue still surveys the courtyard. Built in 1615, its classical proportions belie its origins as a meat market.

This sober, monumental building in Empire style is a conversion of the Almoners’ Orphanage by city architect Jan de Greef.

Gerrit van Arkel’s eyecatching 1905 building is a fine example ofNieuwe Kunst , the Dutch version of Art Nouveau. Built for an insurance company, it is now the world headquarters of the environmental campaigner Greenpeace.

Designed as shipping company offices by van der Mey, de Klerk and Kramer, this fanciful building (1916) is smothered in nautical whimsy – mariners, monsters, and mermaids.