Fresh conservatism, dubious experiments, crude forms… the criticism to which the best architects in the Netherlands are subjected, for example in the pages of Archis, is baffling to foreigners. Likewise the enormous appeal of Dutch architecture abroad appears to the Dutch somewhat inexplicable. To understand why recent Dutch architecture continues to appear fresh and progressive, it is necessary to bear in mind that, in Britain, the attitude of architects toward housing has not changed significantly since the 1950s. The most striking evidence of this permanence is the choice of an octagenarian, Ralph Erskine, to masterplan the flagship Millennium Village at Greenwich. Architects in this country still rely, by and large, upon the idea, inherited from the Modern Movement and subsequently confirmed by decades of practice under the Welfare State, that the design of housing must follow a methodical appraisal of the demands of society. The idea that a market-led economy create a situation in which design precedes, rather than follows, demand remains anathema to them. Ever since the industrial revolution, the British, from William Morris to Colin Ward, have remained deeply suspicious of the market. In consequence, British architects became marginalized into producing housing for special interest groups: for the disabled, for the dispossessed and for the seriously rich. They either build Housing fit for People – for the few minorities who must or simply wish to discuss their needs with designers – or provide, like CZWG, a friendly façade for the market, masking impoverished and conventional dwellings and construction.

Dutch circumstances – the convergence of the VINEX policy, an effective promotion of architecture with the public, and the commissioning of architects who are often better than merely competent – evoke in Britain the pre-war garden cities and the post-war New Towns, thus transforming the Netherlands into a kind of paradise regained. The Dutch often remind foreign visitors that the best-known projects, for example Borneo-Sporenburg, Leidsche Rijn and IJburg, form only the tip of the iceberg. One forgets too easily, it is true, that beneath every architect of public repute, there shall always be another who will seek livelihood rather than distinction. What seems in Holland superficial and about to melt out of sight appears to the British as having the potential to raise the whole substructure of their housing provision from the fiscal bog in which it is presently mired.

Diversity

In Britain, the market is assumed to conspire against good design. Few self-respecting architects will attempt to work with Housing Associations or enter Design and Build contracts. In Holland, the market is at the very least a fact of life, and at its best a game. As Arnold Reijndorp recently said in London, urban planning was a snakes and ladders game but it is now more like a game of Monopoly. And the game is played in the vast architecture supermarket which, in the eyes of some, the Dutch landscape increasingly resembles. MVRDV’s Silodam project in Amsterdam for example is not unlike the monumental aisle of a megastore such as Ikea: along its shelves, uncommonly varied dwellings, characterized not merely by their price tag and square-meterage but also by their spatial quality, will differ from one another like so many products in the MVRDV range. Likewise, buyers or tenants will be able to pick and choose within it a particular neighbourhood like they might Lavazza ‘red’ or Lindt 70% cocoa. The architect’s Netherlands is becoming the megastore of Babel, the answer in the field of spatial planning to the Library of Babel which Borges, in the famous story of this name, made to include not only all books so far written, but every book that could conceivably be written. The present climate of experiment, however gratuitous – best things often are – is a beguiling, unlimited utopia in which the market, in its profusion and inherent diversity, presents itself as an alternative nature. Within it people become, in Reijndorp’s evocative phrase, more and more ‘hunters and gatherers of specific places’.
In Britain, the market shows its evil hand in the fragmentation of society into self-serving and sometimes hostile groups. In Holland on the other hand, the manna of the market manifests itself in the individualization of society which it can better accommodate than the nanny state of yesterday. The value of diversity, whether in individual lives or in the environment, has long been accepted by modern architects, but it comes today with a twist: diversity corresponds no longer merely to a perceived need for identity, but also to a tendency inherent to the market. The point about difference is that it sells – at least until now.
Architects have responded with a proliferation of dwelling types. But how is one to devise a type, which is by definition shared, in a radically individualized society? How is one to decide between a generic option, for example the flexible floor plate of Casco, which provides for change, and a specific option which provides for choice? The contradiction appears insuperable. This conflict, in which specificity so far came on top, has bred a confusion in the notion of type itself. Most striking is the current willingness to modify and compromise the pseudo-Platonic purity of a type to suit specific aspects of a project. A good example is the transformation by Neutelings Riedijk of the standard three-storey terrace house at Huizen to take advantage of the view.
Could the notion of type, to which Riedijk prefers that of living strategy, belong to the past? When Nathalie de Vries of MVRDV refers to the Silodam project as a ‘museum of types’, could she mean more than jest? The project does suggest that type is dead, killed as it were by the completed individualization of society. Yet in a striking paradox, while designs for dwellings continue to be offered as typical, the development of types has evolved into one of the highest art forms in architecture, to the extent that each of their manifestations now appears unique and unrepeatable. Of this, the housing project by Neutelings Riedijk on the GWL site in Amsterdam is a marvellous example. Starting with the brief of providing as many dwellings as possible in the five-storey block with its own front door, the architects were led, with inexorable logic, to provide for each bay a strip containing individual staircases. This principle even persists for the large communal dwelling, so that this now has three starcaises and three front doors. This is for sure not Le Corbusier’s, not even Aldo Rossi’s world, but Marcel Duchamp’s or Lewis Carroll’s, in a housing market which has co-opted the values of art.

Suburbia

Given the choice, a privatized housing market will invariably favour suburban forms of land use. Yet, for all their willingness to be realistic about design control in a market economy, Dutch architects do not come to terms easily with suburbia. For example, Frits Palmboom, as receptive and measured a planner as any, could refer to the density of Ypenburg as ‘more mediocre’ than that of IJburg, meaning that it was lower. Nathalie de Vries, her call for a ‘real suburbanity’ not withstanding, fears that Holland may be filled with ‘a soup of mediocrity’. The arch-realist himself, Rem Koolhaas, has referred to the suburbs as so much ‘plankton’. In principle, intra-muros Paris is a more valuable place than Nanterre, Amsterdam is more valuable than Almere, and Manhattan, than New Jersey. Formlessness, though often promoted as a worthwhile goal for architecture, remains deeply unsettling when it is recognized in the city. There lingers, it appears, a very traditional longing for coherence, shared alike by Christiaanse who describes his layout for Leidsche Rijn as ‘very coherent’, and by Palmboom for whom IJburg will have a ‘subtle hidden coherence’. For all the fascination it exercises, clearly the market will not be left alone, and the Randstad, unlike New York, will not be delirious.
As Palmboom observed, the close connection which once existed between a compact city form and building typologies has come undone. Henceforth the urban designer must rely upon the correspondence between buildings and landscape, between the built and the unbuilt. In the patchwork of formless bits and pieces, dubbed with undeserved glamour metropolis (where is the metro? where is the polis?), a model subsists: that of ‘islands’, each endowed with its own atmosphere. One will consist of little factories around a common green (MVRDV at Ypenburg), another will be like a Pueblo with a central square and a perimeter wall (Mecanoo at Leidsche Rijn), another still will be a ‘desperado’ area with low density houses scattered on a field (Christiaanse on the same site). At IJburg, it is a whole archipelago which Palmboom proposes (admittedly in the water, but canals and lakes, too, were an option), while at Ypenburg, the fields into which the area is subdivided were sometimes described by him as islands.
This island model shows a superficial likeness with the now fashionable map of Parisian urban fragments by Guy Debord, but it represents something more specific than a splintering and dispersal of the compact city. Urban fabric is now condensed and given character, while the landscape around it remains in principle untouched, like so much diminutive green belt or, as an architect put it, ‘dog shit areas’. What the model boils down to is a set of miniature, ersatz, compact cities. It appears at first to emulate the pre-war concept of neighbourhood – the word itself is commonly used – but it does not. These islands are quite inorganic, since at no time is it suggested that fabric and population will jointly evolve. They have more in common with the sets of mathematicians, of which the constituent parts are defined by shared properties. These properties, which may describe a common roof form, material, colour or density, are meant – how could one doubt it?- to convey a sense of community, perhaps even to encourage civic behaviour. In this respect, Chritiaanse’s Leidsche Rijn and Palmboom’s Ypenburg appear hardly different from the more historical developments Seaside or Dorchester (they are only more pluralist, not least because they do not seek the legitimacy of a single tradition), while the New Collectivity boldly stipulated by Nathalie de Vries could conceivably feel at home in the New Urbanism.
Why then has recent architecture in Holland acquired so many foreign admirers, above all in the USA and in Britain where urban villages are the final word in planning wisdom? Dutch architects appear to have recognized, like every student of economy (but, alas, unlike Koolhaas), that the market, and the housing market in particular, is not a blind force. Their extraordinary achievement, however, is to have given to the market, to its managers, economists, developers and builders, a reason to dream, a utopia. To what extent ordinary buildings will be affected by it, and how good and livable they will be, remain separate issues. But for this dream alone, which architect, which house buyer living in a country where the market knows of only one common denominator – financial profit – who among them could not feel indebted?