Bijlmermuseum
The Bijlmermuseum sits inside Grubbehoeve, one of six surviving eleven-storey honeycomb blocks that once defined an entire vision of how people might live. The address is an apartment. The archive is enormous. The admission is five euros.
This is a neighbourhood that argued, loudly and in writing, for its own preservation — and won. What began as a resident initiative in the early 1980s became a formal museum by 1984, and in 2019 the whole remaining complex was designated a municipal protected cityscape. The museum holds the record of that fight, and of everything the Bijlmermeer has been.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to walk the viaduct stretch between Ganzenhoef and Kraaiennest after the tour — the 1,100-metre metro bridge casts good shadow in summer, and the free sports park underneath has a sprint track and football pitches that see real use. The Groeiend Monument, co-designed by Herman Hertzberger, rewards a slower look than most visitors give it.
Deals in Bijlmermuseum
Book directly at the providerHow Bijlmermuseum came to be
The Bijlmermeer was built from 1966 to solve Amsterdam's post-war housing shortage, with cars routed above ground and pedestrians given the green space below. The honeycomb blocks — Gooioord, Groeneveen, Grubbehoeve, Kikkenstein, Kleiburg, Kruitberg — were finished between 1969 and 1972. By the early 1980s, demolition was already being discussed, and residents formed the Stichting Bijlmer Museum to document and defend what they had built their lives inside.
On 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats, killing at least 43 people. The Groeiend Monument, designed with Herman Hertzberger, now stands as a memorial. The neighbourhood lost most of its original blocks to subsequent redevelopment, but the six that remain — and the museum inside one of them — carry the full weight of that history.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.