Standing on Dam Square like it owns the city — which, for a long stretch of history, it essentially did — the Royal Palace of Amsterdam is one of the most ambitious buildings of the Dutch Golden Age. Completed in 1665 and designed by Jacob van Campen, it was originally built as Amsterdam's city hall, a deliberate architectural statement that this merchant republic needed no royal patron to project power. The scale is staggering up close: eight thousand timber piles driven into the boggy Amsterdam soil, a carved stone exterior that still reads as monumental three and a half centuries later.
Palace