The Dutch contribution ‘RealSpace in QuickTimes’ – both an analysis of the computer age with all its characteristics and contradistinctions and an attempt to resolve the position of architecture – makes its own position quite clear by ignoring the theme entirely. Or rather it takes the view that architecture today is no longer a local issue and that questions relating to the profession are the same in many different countries – in short, that there is nothing specific to the Dutch situation.

Architecture is indeed becoming more uniform and more global in character because of the changing means of communication. However, there is another side to the story – that the significant social and cultural differences between one country and another are becoming incxreasingly evident, also in architecture. The profession of architect means different things in different parts of the world.

Since the Dutch contribution attempts to deny these differences, we can deduce that the explicit choice of such a theme is something typically Dutch and that the problem lies close to the heart of the country’s architects. The Dutch pavilion designed by Ben van Berkel consists of a wooden structure defining the space, several monitors showingimages illustrating computer technology and others projected directly on to the walls.Designing an exhibition is often limited to simply placing material and defining the path to be taken by visitors, and very rarely, as here, involves creating a space.

This is one of the Triennale’s most successful contributions in that it is truly architectural: in the entire Milan exhibition only Peter Eisenman’s design provides a spatial experience of equal intensity. But the American architect’s contribution consists only of a design, whereas in the Dutch pavilion one’s perception is subjected to a whole range of other stimuli and sensations, with the risk of the observer becoming overloaded and disorientated. Perhaps a brief schematic introduction would have been useful, something to orient the visitor, whether casual or more interested, to the pavilion and its contents.

Ben van Berkel’s design is less successful where it tries to look like a product of those highly innovative computer techniques which form the subject of the exhibit: if we compare it with the fantastic world of cybernetics it seems less significant and far less spectacular. In a way the design is not so very different from the pavilion for the societe Ernesto Breda that Lucino Baldesari designed for the 1951 Milan International Exhibition, a picture of which can be seen in the Swiss pavilion.

The exhibit is divided into three sections, displaying the three levels at which computerization influences its environment: CAD, the intelligent environment and virtual reality.

The section devoted to CAD shows the stage reached by research in this area, and the articles in the catalogue provide a clear account of the present level of software, with the great advantages rationalization brings as well as the considerable limitations to creativity. It is forecast that the developments in CAD will move architecture on into a new phase of development, that the computer will change not only the status of architecture but also the tasks it is given to perform.

These computer techniques are bound to bring about a radical change in the values of the discipline and constitute the first major innovation in architecture since the Modern Movement. Anyone who supports the view that the computer will cause a revolution and usher in a new architecture must have unbounding confidence in the medium but most of all a lack of confidence in architecture and its ability to solve its own problems.

That architecture is now moving into a time of crisis and that its own tools are no longer adequate to deal with today’s problems, is an indisputable fact: but that this must imply that everything of value that has been achieved until now needs reconsidering is quite another matter. Indeed if that were so, architecture would disappear and a totally new discipline arise in its place. In the discussion on computerization there is sometimes a tendency to confuse the means with the end; not confusion, maybe, so much as a deliberate change in values.

At the moment the computer provides architecture with a tool for producing new form for old substance. But the solution of architecture’s problems lies in the defining of new content; architecture has to redefine its own goals on the basis of a changed attitude towards society and in accordance with human needs. I don’t believe that computerization will meet all modern man’s expectations.

The second part of the exhibit, devoted to the intelligent environment, reviews the role played by the computer in existing buildings and sketches a picture of a possible future in which life is electronically controlled. In particular, it is expected that the use of technology will have such a profound effect that the physical sensation of architecture will cease to exist, that it will no longer be a question of creating objects and spaces but another activity entirely.

We see where this discussion is leading in the third part, the one devoted to virtual reality. Its basic premiss is that virtual reality, the power of the computer to reshape space, can replace direct experience in such a way that real-time buildings become superfluous. I believe that first of all a clear distinction must be drawn between the reproduction of something that already exists (i.e. is present) and something that doesn’t exist either because it has disappeared (is past) or because it has not yet been built (future).

Although essentially we do believe in the importance of a virtual reality that becomes real by representing something that doesn’t exist, we also believe that the virtual production of something that does can only be an approximation and will always display values other than thoseof the original. The immediate perception of architecture is non-reproducible because it involves experiences that cannot be rationally codified. The instructive paradox of showing in the Triennale pavilion a simulation of that very same pavilion, provides the opportunity of comparing a real promenade with a virtual one through the same space. In this way it becomes evident how great the differences are, and also that architecture, in essence a concrete art, is unable to utilize the ambiguity between true and false so typical of our society.

The Dutch contribution to the 19th Triennale is compelling above all in that it takes up an issue very contemporary to architecture, while the contributions made by many other countries deal with themes that are already passe. The argument is addressed most inventively, and succeeds in explaining something that many have so far failed to understand: namely, that the computer is not just a technical phenomenon but also, and most importantly, a cultural phenomenon, and that technology is not an inevitable process but the consequence of the choices we make.

The power of the Dutch contribution lies also in the many questions raised and the few answers given, for whether we share the optimism and the basic thinking is in fact determined only by the quality of the final result, and it is still too early to form an opinion. While mentality and culture may be capable of rapid adjustment, architecture can by its very nature only adjust over the long term. Culture and architecture each proceed very much at their own pace.

The Dutch Pavilion for the 1996 Milan Triennale. Design by Van Berkel and Bos Architects. Computer graphics by Cees van Giessen, 1996.