The Shock of the New in Holland

Architectural Record July 2000

Although greenery is ubiquitous in the Netherlands, Dutch people readily admit that theirs is an entirely constructed landscape. Whether agricultural land created from the vast drainage projects of the post-war era or parklands that sweep through the Modernist slab-building housing estates, every square inch of land has been obsessively demarcated, planned and designed. Such rigor is perhaps inevitable in a country that would slip underwater were it not for a gigantic infrastructure that doggedly pumps water to keep the North Sea at bay.

It takes a lot of organization, planning, and consensus to keep such an unlikely nation viable, and these qualities the Dutch have in abundance. A rational, humanistic planning and design process that dates from the 1920s has made Holland among the world’s wealthiest and best-housed nations. The kinds of Modernist planning principles that have long been discarded in the U.S. remain viable in the Netherlands because they have worked. One can get out of the even the largest cities in a few minutes by bicycle, car, or train. While in America, Modernism got associated with massive, sterile housing blocks built for the purpose of warehousing poor people, Modernism in Holland produced housing and schools that were both economical and amenable. While almost no Dutch people live in big houses on large lots, hardly anyone does not live in a well-designed dwelling with good light and access to at least a patch of garden. Americans may have more choice, but Dutch people value the knowledge that “you know what goes up next to you,” says architect Jeroen van Schooten of Meyer & Van Schooten.

Architects and architecture are deeply embedded in the planning and construction process in the Netherlands (see also March 2000, page 206). The Netherlands’ famous live-and-let-live attitude combined with a commitment to design took what is arguably its most extraordinary form in the Miesian column-and-“privacy” panel system artfully deployed by the Rotterdam Planning Department in its Municipal Heroin Prostitution Toleration Zone, of1993.

Architects have also maintained their status by surrendering their proclivity to individualized expression. There have always been anomalies, such as when Piet Blom turned cubes diagonally and mounted them on columns as housing. Especially since the 1980s, though, a soft-edged neo-modernism has prevailed.

Over the last decade a much gutsier, more expressionistic strain of architecture has rapidly emerged in Holland. Like drawers of a filing cabinet left open, architect MVRDV cantilevered housing units 40 feet out of the typically prim social-housing slab. Red-painted light masts, designed by landscape architect West 8, bend and hover over the Schouwburgplein, a public square in downtown Rotterdam, like hydraulically feeding brontosaurus heads. Rem Koohaas’ Kunsthalle, also in Rotterdam, takes the visitor on a dizzying itinerary up and down ramps, indoors and out. Neutelings Riedijik clad a fire station in a zigzag metallic armor, a pattern derived from tire treads. Perhaps the most notorious recent Dutch building is La Minneart, also by Neutelings Riedijk, a horizontal Modernist wedge rendered as a work of Pop art by its veiny, red-clay colored gunnite surface and the idiosyncratic march of the letters of the building’s name between Corbusian pilotis.

It’s easy to conclude that such psychologically complicated–even self-indulgent–buildings are the progeny of Koolhaas, the Netherland’s most prolific theorist–if not builder–of architecture. Stop living in “a straitjacket of self-effacement,” Koolhaas urged in a widely reprinted lecture he gave at a1990 symposium.

A younger generation does admit a debt to Koolhaas, but the fertile architectural scene in Holland today appears to spring from a number of sources. As privatization and the winds of globalization have buffeted the Dutch economy, the nation has unwound many of the comforting strictures of the social-welfare state, in the process altering the state-centered planning process and the consensus-driven design approach.

So far, wealth, much of it in the form of offshore-oil revenues, has eased the transition. In the mid 1980s, the heavily subsidized social-housing societies were told they had to compete with the private market. Once housing production was 70 percent social housing with the rest being for the private market. Today, the proportions have reversed. Always export oriented, the government has lavishly funded the rebuilding and expansion of Schipol airport, one of Europe’s major hubs, while permitting private, American-style office parks to proliferate along suburban freeways. Holland is fledging architecture, once a heavily protected ward of the state, into an export-oriented private-sector business on the wings of subsidies for design competitions, conferences, publications, and the Dutch Architectural Institute. (Particularly notable recent overviews are 20th Century Architecture in the Netherlands, by Hans van Dijk and 20th Century Urban Design in the Netherlands, by Hans Ibeling, both published by NAi).

In a nation that has had a government board to assure the “visual decency” of buildings for almost a century, the umbilical of state involvement has yet to be severed. The Netherlands is in the midst of an enormous government-sponsored, highly planned effort to build a million new units of housing by 2010, impressive for a nation with about the same population as Florida. Since much of the new housing is intended to offer greater amenity to the nation’s increasing number of smaller but wealthier households, there is an ongoing debate about whether the tasteful, but somewhat antiseptic state-sponsored neo-Modernism should give way to greater individual expression. Why should groups of architects in government employ preside over the architectural appearance of the Netherlands, asks Carel Weeber, a dissident in Holland’s emerging taste debate. Housing production should reflect consumer desire to a greater extent, say theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefivre. They recognize that doing so would inevitably lead down the garden-city path to the nostalgic and romantic imagery of homebuilders in America, who prefer to derive their designs from marketers and focus groups rather than from architects.

And yet the Dutch seem little inclined yet to adopt the individualistic, self-aggrandizing and privatized culture of America, however well aligned it may be with the ever-changing currents of global capital. The Netherlands recognizes that cities with amenity and well-coordinated infrastructure will successfully compete in less-protectionist European and world markets.

Aesthetic pioneers or pop-culture poseurs?
“The desire now is to strike a proper balance between state initiatives and responsible initiatives from private parties,” explained Wouter Veldhuis of the young architecture firm Must in an interview. But Dutch architects seem more attuned than ever to the contradictions of their own situation: they now tinge their socially responsible work with influences derived from world flows of multimedia. Mart Stam’s Trousers: Stories From Behind the Scenes of Dutch Moral Modernism, a book by Crimson, an architectural firm that practices largely in a (state supported) theoretical mode, posits Winy Maas, of MVRDV, as standing “for the typical Dutch architect.” There is “a certain pragmatism regarding the conditions under which he works: suburbanization, automobility, pop culture; and a certain coquettishness about his Dutchness,” a pose that is “slightly ironic,” but never “cynical.”

Today the seductive imagery with which Dutch architects surround themselves (see such hefty volumes as Koolhaas’ S, M,L, XL, MVRDV’s FARMAX, or Van Berkel and Bos’ MOVE) suggests to the embattled American designer that Dutch architects inhabit exactly the world of enormous artistic freedom and public respect American architects fail to achieve even in an America overflowing in wealth.

Are Dutch architects today playing with fire? In the 1990 lecture, Koolhaas claimed that in Holland, “grandeur and architecture have, it seems, been unhitched for all time.” He also noted admiringly that, “There is a major stream in modernity that has no concern for people, that isn’t humanistic, seeing itself as a part of a whirlwind that spares nothing.” In admiring that free but nihilistic universe, the Dutch architect is like the adolescent confronted for the first time by a heroin-loaded syringe: Can I get the thrill without paying the consequences? If the consequences include depriving the Dutch architect of the public respect that has come from subsuming the self-expressionistic urge to the larger good, then they will suffer consequences the American architect–far lower on the cultural totem pole–knows well. There is no heavy planner’s hand in the U.S., but architects spend their days trying to get the client, perpetually driven by “shareholder value,” to approve a material slightly more inspired than drywall or synthetic stucco.

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	The Shock of the New in Holland Architectural Record July 2000 Although greenery is ubiquitous in the Netherlands, Dutch people readily admit that theirs is an entirely constructed landscape. Whether agricultural land created from the vast drainage projects of the post-war era or parklands that sweep through the Modernist slab-building housing estates, every square inch of land has been obsessively demarcated, planned and designed. Such rigor is perhaps inevitable in a country that would slip underwater were it not for a gigantic infrastructure that doggedly pumps water to keep the North Sea at bay. It takes a lot of organization, planning, and consensus to keep such an unlikely nation viable, and these qualities the Dutch have in abundance. A rational, humanistic planning and design process that dates from the 1920s has made Holland among the world’s wealthiest and best-housed nations. The kinds of Modernist planning principles that have long been discarded in the U.S. remain viable in the Netherlands because they have worked. One can get out of the even the largest cities in a few minutes by bicycle, car, or train. While in America, Modernism got associated with massive, sterile housing blocks built for the purpose of warehousing poor people, Modernism in Holland produced housing and schools that were both economical and amenable. While almost no Dutch people live in big houses on large lots, hardly anyone does not live in a well-designed dwelling with good light and access to at least a patch of garden. Americans may have more choice, but Dutch people value the knowledge that “you know what goes up next to you,” says architect Jeroen van Schooten of Meyer & Van Schooten. Architects and architecture are deeply embedded in the planning and construction process in the Netherlands (see also March 2000, page 206). The Netherlands’ famous live-and-let-live attitude combined with a commitment to design took what is arguably its most extraordinary form in the Miesian column-and-“privacy” panel system artfully deployed by the Rotterdam Planning Department in its Municipal Heroin Prostitution Toleration Zone, of1993. Architects have also maintained their status by surrendering their proclivity to individualized expression. There have always been anomalies, such as when Piet Blom turned cubes diagonally and mounted them on columns as housing. Especially since the 1980s, though, a soft-edged neo-modernism has prevailed. Over the last decade a much gutsier, more expressionistic strain of architecture has rapidly emerged in Holland. Like drawers of a filing cabinet left open, architect MVRDV cantilevered housing units 40 feet out of the typically prim social-housing slab. Red-painted light masts, designed by landscape architect West 8, bend and hover over the Schouwburgplein, a public square in downtown Rotterdam, like hydraulically feeding brontosaurus heads. Rem Koohaas’ Kunsthalle, also in Rotterdam, takes the visitor on a dizzying itinerary up and down ramps, indoors and out. Neutelings Riedijik clad a fire station in a zigzag metallic armor, a pattern derived from tire treads. Perhaps the most notorious recent Dutch building is La Minneart, also by Neutelings Riedijk, a horizontal Modernist wedge rendered as a work of Pop art by its veiny, red-clay colored gunnite surface and the idiosyncratic march of the letters of the building’s name between Corbusian pilotis. It’s easy to conclude that such psychologically complicated–even self-indulgent–buildings are the progeny of Koolhaas, the Netherland’s most prolific theorist–if not builder–of architecture. Stop living in “a straitjacket of self-effacement,” Koolhaas urged in a widely reprinted lecture he gave at a1990 symposium. A younger generation does admit a debt to Koolhaas, but the fertile architectural scene in Holland today appears to spring from a number of sources. As privatization and the winds of globalization have buffeted the Dutch economy, the nation has unwound many of the comforting strictures of the social-welfare state, in the process altering the state-centered planning process and the consensus-driven design approach. So far, wealth, much of it in the form of offshore-oil revenues, has eased the transition. In the mid 1980s, the heavily subsidized social-housing societies were told they had to compete with the private market. Once housing production was 70 percent social housing with the rest being for the private market. Today, the proportions have reversed. Always export oriented, the government has lavishly funded the rebuilding and expansion of Schipol airport, one of Europe’s major hubs, while permitting private, American-style office parks to proliferate along suburban freeways. Holland is fledging architecture, once a heavily protected ward of the state, into an export-oriented private-sector business on the wings of subsidies for design competitions, conferences, publications, and the Dutch Architectural Institute. (Particularly notable recent overviews are 20th Century Architecture in the Netherlands, by Hans van Dijk and 20th Century Urban Design in the Netherlands, by Hans Ibeling, both published by NAi). In a nation that has had a government board to assure the “visual decency” of buildings for almost a century, the umbilical of state involvement has yet to be severed. The Netherlands is in the midst of an enormous government-sponsored, highly planned effort to build a million new units of housing by 2010, impressive for a nation with about the same population as Florida. Since much of the new housing is intended to offer greater amenity to the nation’s increasing number of smaller but wealthier households, there is an ongoing debate about whether the tasteful, but somewhat antiseptic state-sponsored neo-Modernism should give way to greater individual expression. Why should groups of architects in government employ preside over the architectural appearance of the Netherlands, asks Carel Weeber, a dissident in Holland’s emerging taste debate. Housing production should reflect consumer desire to a greater extent, say theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefivre. They recognize that doing so would inevitably lead down the garden-city path to the nostalgic and romantic imagery of homebuilders in America, who prefer to derive their designs from marketers and focus groups rather than from architects. And yet the Dutch seem little inclined yet to adopt the individualistic, self-aggrandizing and privatized culture of America, however well aligned it may be with the ever-changing currents of global capital. The Netherlands recognizes that cities with amenity and well-coordinated infrastructure will successfully compete in less-protectionist European and world markets. Aesthetic pioneers or pop-culture poseurs? “The desire now is to strike a proper balance between state initiatives and responsible initiatives from private parties,” explained Wouter Veldhuis of the young architecture firm Must in an interview. But Dutch architects seem more attuned than ever to the contradictions of their own situation: they now tinge their socially responsible work with influences derived from world flows of multimedia. Mart Stam’s Trousers: Stories From Behind the Scenes of Dutch Moral Modernism, a book by Crimson, an architectural firm that practices largely in a (state supported) theoretical mode, posits Winy Maas, of MVRDV, as standing “for the typical Dutch architect.” There is “a certain pragmatism regarding the conditions under which he works: suburbanization, automobility, pop culture; and a certain coquettishness about his Dutchness,” a pose that is “slightly ironic,” but never “cynical.” Today the seductive imagery with which Dutch architects surround themselves (see such hefty volumes as Koolhaas’ S, M,L, XL, MVRDV’s FARMAX, or Van Berkel and Bos’ MOVE) suggests to the embattled American designer that Dutch architects inhabit exactly the world of enormous artistic freedom and public respect American architects fail to achieve even in an America overflowing in wealth. Are Dutch architects today playing with fire? In the 1990 lecture, Koolhaas claimed that in Holland, “grandeur and architecture have, it seems, been unhitched for all time.” He also noted admiringly that, “There is a major stream in modernity that has no concern for people, that isn’t humanistic, seeing itself as a part of a whirlwind that spares nothing.” In admiring that free but nihilistic universe, the Dutch architect is like the adolescent confronted for the first time by a heroin-loaded syringe: Can I get the thrill without paying the consequences? If the consequences include depriving the Dutch architect of the public respect that has come from subsuming the self-expressionistic urge to the larger good, then they will suffer consequences the American architect–far lower on the cultural totem pole–knows well. There is no heavy planner’s hand in the U.S., but architects spend their days trying to get the client, perpetually driven by “shareholder value,” to approve a material slightly more inspired than drywall or synthetic stucco.
© copyright 2006 James S. Russell \| terms