hallways: Berlage

November 2012

I live in a house without hallways, in my dreams corridors are always endless, or hidden, or dark and without people, with broken tiles, old doors and age-old porcelain wash basins. A hallway is an undefined place, not a place to be but to pass through. Maybe this undefined character is precisely why hallways feature in novels and films as a place for the unexpected, for suspence or encounter in the dark: Danielewski’s “5 minute hallway” in The House of Leaves, Tarkovsky’s hotel corridor in Nostalgia.

A hallway exists in favour of other spaces, and only seldom becomes a space of its own. The long corridor of the City Museum (Gemeentemuseum) in The Hague, designed by Berlage, is an exception. This hallway celebrates the waiting, accompanying the transition from the banal daily world to the other world of art. A space between inside and outside, between private and public, between daily practice and divine art? The hallway as a space between two worlds.

photo's by Sebas Veldhuisen

 

Klaske Havik