Water State Church
Waterstaatskirche ( Dutch Waterstaatskerk ) is the name given to a group of church buildings in the Netherlands that were built between 1824 and 1875 for the purpose of denominational compensation under the direction and financial support of the Rijkswaterstaat authority.
background
Two and a half centuries after the Reformation in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 19th century, the denominational affiliation of numerous pre-Reformation church buildings was still controversial between Reformed and Catholics . A regulation that determined the affiliation of the respective building according to the population share of the denominations failed mainly because of the resistance of the Reformed.
Legal basis
Thereupon the government passed a law in 1824 which, under certain conditions, promised the building of new churches by the state, specifically the Rijkswaterstaat authority and its engineers. The churches that arose on this basis until 1875 were mostly Catholic, to a lesser extent Reformed churches.
Style and rating
Since the largest number of these churches were built in the first decade after 1824 and followed the classicist architectural style that set the tone at the time , the Waterstaatskerk in the Netherlands was wrongly used to denote this style and, when its time came to an end, a derogatory one: Wat er Staat is Waterstaat - "What it says is the state of water". In fact, the Water State Churches are built in very different styles of historicism , and today many are considered successful architectural examples of their epoch.
Examples of water state churches
Church in Nieuw-Beerta
St. Boniface in Dordrecht
The octagonal church in Veenhuizen
Church in Laren (Gelderland)
St. Joseph's Church in Haarlem
The Hartebrugkerk in Leiden
literature
- Arjen Johan Looyenga: Van waterstaatskerk dead cathedraal. De St. Josephskerk te Haarlem en het werk van de waterstaatsarchitect HH Dansdorp . Vereniging Haerlem, Haarlem 1990.
Web links
- Waterstaatskerk Nieuw Beerta. kerklocaties.nl, accessed March 2, 2017 (Dutch).
- Waterstaatskerk Overschild. VVV Nederland, 2016, accessed on March 2, 2017 (Dutch).