The avant-garde and the established order maintain a tense relationship defined by mutual interest and differing concerns. Those who are established are liable to be overrun by the new if they are so incautious as to allow it to catch them unawares. Those who are in the vanguard – or at least think that they are – are liable to lose their way, but it may also happen that their social base expands and that they gradually assume power and become established, perhaps in spite of themselves. This is what happened to OMA and Rem Koolhaas. What was avant-garde when Delirious New York was published, is now no less ‘establishment’ than the Biedermeier culture once was. Belonging to the establishment implies a certain status which may manifest itself in all sorts of ways. Koolhaas, for example, has no shortage of commissions that could be called prestigious, has no lack of major awards, holds the right professorship in the right place, and participates in events that turn out to matter. In short, he is someone who has made it and who enjoys corresponding status.

In fact this was already a foregone conclusion when Reference: OMA was devised and written three years ago. As soon as someone, as happened with Koolhaas, starts to beget a new cultural generation worthy of being taken seriously, that person joins the established order. In this instance, nevertheless, it was not easy to substantiate such a conclusion. The ‘established order’ is an awkward and ambiguous concept to apply to someone like Koolhaas whose written work regularly resounds to ‘sous le pavé, la plage’. Nor does it seem especially relevant when his entire oeuvre (a word laden with connotations that OMA will resist to the bitter end) testifies to ‘ecstasy’ with ‘this time, this year, this very spot, this very moment and no other’.1) Anyone who ignores everything but the here and now would seem to turn their back on any kind of established order. But is that possible? No, it is not. Despite itself, OMA became established – although that probably says more about OMA’s condition than about the condition of the established order itself.

Canon

Reference: OMA, in order not to offend anyone and also because it was considered of minor importance, ignored the question of OMA’s influence via the adaptation of the external characteristics of the practice’s realized buildings, a process that attested to the precipitation of Koolhaas’s cultural goods in a broad field of imitators. OMA’s spectacular series of new typologies, new compositions and new combinations of materials disregarded the injunction to perpetual renewal and instead crystallized into a canon that could be recycled by others, sometimes even by OMA itself.
Reference: OMA did, however, look in detail at the stance Koolhaas passed on to his ‘students’ at OMA. The word student must necessarily be enclosed in inverted commas, for the essence of what was conveyed was every bit as anti-academic as OMA’s ‘oeuvre’: the architect was positioned, not as someone who has mastered a craft made up of transferrable knowledge with a certain pretension to timelessness, but as the inventor of brilliant, one-off and contemporary solutions and as the scenographer of as yet non-existent vistas. Various of Koolhaas’s former assistants have since put this ‘lesson’ into practice with so much success that their fledgling practices have rapidly joined the ranks of the most prominent architectural offices in the Netherlands.
Willem Jan Neutelings has launched a regular production line of buildings that each in its own way seems to be a genuine invention, that is to say the result of a sound analysis of the problem culminating in the choice of a brilliant, previously unheard-off solution. A good illustration is his almost completed Minnaert Building on the Uithof university campus in Utrecht, for which he broke open the standard university building programme, turning the ‘tare’ (circulation space and other elements of the building normally ‘off limits’ to architect) into the nucleus of the design. They were bundled together into one powerful hall which is at once the key to the ecological concept of this building: low tech, high performance.
MVRDV, now that their VPRO building is finished and has been visited by all the media, enjoy an equally solid reputation. Here, too, we are dealing with a unique specimen of eloquent architecture that overturns all characterizations of a building as a neutral container with its ‘geological formations’ formed by stairs, ramps and levels, a range of different interior styles and a lush green roof that compensates for the nature excavated from beneath the building. The successful trio’s forthcoming FARMAX book has in common with Koolhaas’s magnum opus that it has been avidly quoted before it has even appeared and that it seems to be getting steadily thicker than was anticipated in the various stages of its preparation and advertisement. The book, which addresses the spatial aspect of building density, is concerned with a typical inventor’s issue: what alternatives are there to the enormous wastage of space that a country like the Netherlands seems to specialize in when it comes to spatial planning? MVRDV has come up with a series of options as inventive as they are inexhaustible and that they cannot wait to try out, and are already receiving sympathetic coverage: ‘The Lost Generation’, concluded one newspaper recently after describing MVRDV’s feverish search for a more efficient and richer spatial order, ‘may one day save the Netherlands’.2)
Rients Dijkstra, who during his time at OMA had already made his mark in projects with large-scale infrastructural programmes like the Hague tram tunnel, immediately made the transition to big urban design projects when he set up his own office, Max. 1. As the designing genius behind Riek Bakker, the top urban planning apparatchik of the 1990s, Dijkstra threw himself into the design of Leidsche Rijn, a very large and complex building site near Utrecht, where he tried to get a grip on the phenomenon of orgware: an invisible but defining landscape embracing administration, politics and policy.3) Because of the sluggish dynamics of urban planning, Dijkstra’s rise to fame was not as rapid as the others’. On the other hand, his independent practice was very soon involved in the most exciting sort of projects: the projects that really matter – on a prosaic level because of their sheer size but also because of the opportunity they offer for breaking new ground.

The establishment incorporates

The success of the ‘students’, or at least of a significant selection of them, rendered Koolhaas and OMA more visible in Dutch culture than would have been the case if only OMA itself had functioned effectively. Obviously, social support for everything OMA has stood for since Delirious New York has broadened considerably. The conditions of an urban reality subject to drastic change in the 1980s and 1990s fitted in with the specific inclination of OMA culture. Both the city and the discipline by which it was organized, urban planning, suffered a loss of identity and concrete substance. Against this OMA posited the role of the inventor who, in his bursts of ecstatic ‘epiphany’, could be considered capable of offering a new perspective by dint of his relentless concentration on the contemporary programme.
But the fascinating interaction between OMA’s approach and the actual condition of city and urban planning did not immediately make Koolhaas’s message (including that of his former associates) that of the establishment. Before this could happen cultural politics – in itself a ramified domain with at least an academic, bureaucratic, political and museological component – needed to identify with OMA’s ecstasy. There are signs that this is indeed happening. There is a sum-total of discrete facts which, taken together, are more than the sum itself and which may suggest a pattern.
To begin with there is the political instrument which, since the government’s curtailment of its own role of ‘prime mover’ in the spatial order, has been promoted to one of the key elements of spatial policy: the subsidy system. The handful of quangos entrusted with the distribution of subsidies are a marvel of free-thinking tolerance in their readiness to support ‘progressive’ designers. Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL was liberally showered with subsidies, but talented associates can also count on support. The latest bulletin issued by the Foundation for Fine Arts, Design and Architecture presented, as clear evidence of money well spent, a typical inventor’s plan drawn up by Kamiel Klaasse in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas. The project concerned a competition entry for a library with purely electronic contents, the programme of which, after a joint brainwave on the part of the design duo, was fully incorporated into wall, floor and ceiling: the entire gigantic interior could be regarded as a bonus.4)
A new and unique genre in the subsidy system is the fairly expensive phenomenon of the architects’ tour, which is open to designers who survive a selection process that evaluates the quality of their work as well as their reasons for wanting to visit the nominated destination. Oddly enough, last year’s well-organized programme did not go to locations with an obvious cultural political relevance to the Dutch context. The tour took in South-East Asia, visiting precisely those zones where, according to Rem Koolhaas (witness both S,M,L,XL and his celebrated contribution to Documenta X), the post-apocalyptic city is in the making: a city that has had to abandon the struggle with historically loaded concepts like ‘identity’ in order to become wholly new and artificial. The committee’s choice of this particular destination is a clear cultural political signal: the choice was not dictated by any acutely felt need from within the Dutch spatial order, but by a theme that is reverberating in the wider cultural context and which in this case is clearly associated with OMA.
Then there is the question of the selection of architects by client bodies. This too, incidentally, is regularly steered by the government by means of the ‘lists of architects’ that are compulsorily issued to developers interested in a particular development site. For a long time such lists were full of names associated with schoolteachers’ modernism (there has probably never yet been a list that did not include Mecanoo), but the order portfolios of Neutelings, Christiaanse and MVRDV show that they, too, have now been discovered by officialdom. But the most significant commissions, in terms of cultural politics, are those that betray a certain official pecking order. Who was recently awarded the prestigious commission for the Dutch pavilion at the world expo in Hanover in the year 2000? MVRDV. Their design, not so surprisingly for a practice obsessed with the issue of density, features ‘stacked nature’ – another phenomenon the average Dutch person had never heard of until that moment. An inventor’s plan, obviously emanating from the school portrayed in Reference: OMA, serves here as the nation’s visiting card.

Progressive cultural politics

Were we to be so bold as to draw a longer historical line illustrating how architectural vanguards seek contact with the society around them, we might begin such a line, for example, at the urban renewal generation of Theo Bosch, Paul de Ley and many others. As children of the 1960s generation, they were by definition on strained terms with the established order which was invariably characterized as an inflexible fossil; the spontaneous social structure of the ‘neighbourhood’, by contrast, offered the possibility of a form based on freedom. But such views meant that their only natural partners were clients with similar ideals – and they were not exactly plentiful. By renouncing ideology and concentrating instead on the language of the building, the later generation of schoolteachers’ modernists rediscovered the link with the aspirations of the average client. The interests of both coincided: the goal was simply a building that could be fully described using such innocuous terms as interesting, beautiful and even serviceable.
The generation that is now, in the second half of the 1990s, starting to get the upper hand, and in which OMA and ex-OMA loom large, is capable of much more than simply maintaining ties with a whole range of clients, institutional or otherwise. They have succeeded in forging a coalition with a cultural politics that is supported by official architectural policy. Politicians, officials, subsidy givers, major clients, academics and museum directors are all convinced of the importance of the ideas propagated by the new generation and what is more, they convert that conviction into concrete decisions and deeds. Hence all those commissions, subsidies, symposia and travel programmes, usually construed abroad as examples of an enviably progressive cultural political climate.
The generation of Reference: OMA is one of the larger spiders in the current cultural political web and thus belongs to the same establishment with which its ‘temperamental father’ has been doing business for some time now.5) But this sketch of the participants in the established order is not enough. What do the cultural political players of the establishment actually stand for? What is the essence of the opinions held by those who sit around the negotiating table? In order to be able to say anything sensible about this, one would need to observe each cultural political event individually from within, for there is no readily discernible coherent message about the cultural political departure-point. All the more interesting therefore are the rare clues that emerge when the establishment is forced to come clean about its own ideological anchors. One of these clues is to be found in a recent cultural export item aimed at explaining a new generation of architects (including MVRDV and Max. 1) to the world: the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Nine + One.
The curious thing is that this venture, intended as a concise way of spelling out where Holland is ‘at’ architecturally, is elucidated in purely negative terms. The generation of ten is characterized by a lot of ‘is nots’ and scarcely any ‘is toos’. It starts with the title which is not Ten but Nine + One, because the group is not a collective and there is always one – a different one every time, of course – who does not fit in with the rest. Nor, so the introduction assures us, is there any collective style, for the participants are not concerned with the formalistic preoccupations of earlier generations. More generally, there is no connection at all with historical considerations since this is a generation brought up on the video clip. No wonder then that Kristin Feireiss remarks in her introduction that we should also stop talking about an ideology. How’s that? What are we actually dealing with here if both style and ideology no longer apply? A ‘refreshingly independent attitude’ we are told, but that can only be good news for those who always knew that Dutch architecture after schoolteachers’ modernism was liable to become more inert and more superficial.
Nine + One, as a product of the establishment, necessarily sets a cultural political benchmark. That benchmark defines a big coalition into which the OMA and ex-OMA generation has allowed itself to be incorporated and which, ideologically speaking, has the consistency of soft blancmange. This coalition makes no binding judgements about anything – that would be out of keeping with the ‘refreshingly independent attitude’. Because it trivializes and takes literally Koolhaas’s obsession with the contemporary, the coalition does not signify anything defensible, any more that it nominates anything from the previous status quo that is worthy of protection. Given the breadth of the coalition’s manifestations – from ethereal intellectual essays to highly concrete building tasks – we have reached an alarming zero point.
For the time being, the name of the many-headed golden calf of establishment and avant-garde, united as one, is Nine + One. However, at the risk of being thought an incorrigible conservative, one is tempted to start re-explaining a few archaic concepts to the general public. Perhaps these concepts require an insight into the implications of time and evolution that goes beyond what can reasonably be expected of a generation that is constantly congratulating itself on its own freedom; it could be. Travels to South-East Asia notwithstanding there is, for example, the ineradicable question of the genius loci: the identification of the Dutch landscape as a transforming zone which must not only be treated to a brilliant selection of motives from the here and now, but which also imposes a genuine obligation of continuity, a genuine obligation to perform deeds that are based on a meticulous analysis of what is already there. There is also, despite all those mesmerizing video clips, the metaphysical task of exploring the long historical lines of the design discipline. T.S. Eliot was aware of the benefits of an imaginary sojourn ‘among the dead’; it yielded a meaningful broadening of subject matter. Ultimately, after prolonged study, one became ‘a medium … that combines impressions and experiences in unique and unexpected ways’. It is these kinds of themes, arising from the need to see beyond the neurosis of the here and now, that constitute a lasting cultural political task, not merely as a form of monument preservation, but in offensive spatial policy. Granted, it is a task more appropriate to the establishment than to an up-and-coming avant-garde. The avant-garde can usually count on being greeted with scepticism and critical counterblasts by the established order: that is simply the natural division of roles. Perhaps the truth lies exactly in the middle of the force field represented by the two poles. The present big coalition is certainly a remarkable and powerful phenomenon – but unfortunately it is incapable of satisfying this simple dialectic.