Cruquius restored!
Description
The lecture is about the cascading restoration of steam pumping station de Cruquius, built to the design of J.A. Beijerink between 1846 and 1849 for the reclamation of Haarlemmermeer. Together with the Leeghwater and the Lynden, and looking like neo-Gothic castles, the three pumping stations pumped 800 million m3 of water out of the 18,000-hectare lake in three years, a tour de force of the first order. Cruquius remained in operation until 1933. After that, on the initiative of the Royal Institute of Engineers, the pumping station was saved from demolition and set up as a museum; in 1973, Cruquius was the first industrial monument to come under national protection.
By 2010, Cruquius was in poor structural condition. In the past, people had tried to make the building watertight with rock-hard cement mortars for grouting and plastering. However, the result was that the metre-thick walls were completely saturated with water and kilometres of jointing now had to be replaced. Even below the waterline, for which many cubic metres of silt and wreckage had to be dredged away first. The cast-iron parts of the building, such as doors, windows and the pump pistons of the big machine were badly rusted and were treated revealing several surprises. The wooden dump floor around the machine building was as leaky as a basket and was restored in a non-traditional way! Besides the structural work, the historic colour scheme has also been brought back and the chimney has been re-capped. During the lecture, the work will be explained and the restoration principles and their consequences for this special cascade restoration will be revealed.
10.00 am Museum open
10.30 am Lecture by Ms Isja Finaly in the Water Board Room
11.20 pm Break
11.40 pm Guided tour in groups by experts
12.45 pm End of visit
Speaker(s)
Isja Finaly (1965) is head of conservation and deputy director of Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser (association for the preservation of historically or architecturally valuable buildings in the Netherlands). She studied architectural history at the Free University in Amsterdam, took a two-year postgraduate course at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology and wrote a book on F.W. van Gendt, Engineer for the Dismantling of Fortresses ('Doorbroken Barriers'). She worked for four years as a historic preservation officer with the provinces of Limburg and North Holland and from 1996 to 2009 with the predecessors of the Cultural Heritage Agency
Location
2142 ER Cruquius
Organiser
History of Technology
Histechnica
Name and contact details for information
Further information from L.A. Hissink at the e-mail address below.