“For a start, regional specificity cannot be enforced. If it exists at all, it is as a tradition on which people build, something that develops from within. […] Vinexland ⁽²⁾ has become a popular object of criticism, the most frequently-cited aspect being its monotony. In this sense, those small image-dependent retro districts, where a historical façade sauce has been applied in an attempt to mask the uniformity, are also a kind of criticism. As far as I am concerned, however, it is a rather one-sided kind, the tragic apotheosis of an age in which image has become too important. Not that I want to proclaim a radical renewal by outlawing anything old, but anything capable of getting away from this kind of mainstream architecture seems to me like a breath of fresh air. We realized that our research should entail an attempt to avoid saddling residential building in the region with a fetishizing or historicizing image, rather presenting a ready-made design precept. This quite quickly compelled us to consider the idea of authenticity, in the form of a predilection for the real, the honest, the self-evident.” ⁽³⁾

There is another Netherlands, far away in terms of ideology and attitude from the one we knew a decade ago, a sort of parallel country with indistinct borders where architecture is no longer a social instrument capable of forcing innovation and producing change. There is an unsuspected Netherlands made up of wooden buildings that seek a concrete relationship with reality, small-sized dwellings engendered by the economic crisis and a protective attitude toward users of space. A little-known Netherlands that takes its distance from the optimism and the major projects of the 1990s, where a post-ideological approach is emerging to planning and architects have focused attention on the visual and social characteristics of the territory in which they operate. A surprising country where the new projects use a modern alphabet to reinterpret forms belonging to the past, maintaining an identity capable of capturing the collective imagination to the same degree as recent work impressed those in the know. In this “other” country ignored by the media, the buildings are lived in and carefully judged because they do not possess the extrovert and visionary nature of their more famous peers and do not seek the judgment of professionals but of the inhabitants. This unexpected architecture disorientates those who simply glance at it en passant. The superficial initial reaction leaves it camouflaged within the context, pervaded by a sense of warmth and familiarity. But then, on closer observation, something more subtle and measured disturbs our opinion. Just turn a corner and you will discover that a traditional façade and one using contemporary vocabulary can coexist in the same building. On drawing closer, you discover details and a handling of surfaces that are typically modern. You feel surprise and involvement, overcome by estranged familiarity.

Post-ideologies and slow food
A yardstick of the cultural change underway in the Netherlands is provided by recent publications including the latest Yearbooks and especially the one for 2003-04 where the reviews of new works include some restorations of illustrious buildings: the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, Peutz’s Glass Palace in Herleen, and the Zonnestraal Sanatorium by the architects Duiker and Bijvoet in Hilversum. This was the first time anyone had ever deigned to write about restoration in the Netherlands. The Jaarboek published by the NAi presents a series of “traditional” examples, some of which sold in kits for do-it-yourself assembly and construction, and others designed to blend in with the setting. One is surprised by the presence of commercial works using traditional styles or even vernacular forms. This obviously comes as a shock for those leafing through the pages of the publication that has done more than any other to spread the gospel of Dutch innovation and pragmatism. It is like being at the end of a party with the few guests remaining to share out the remnants of the banquet. OMA is present with the Poppodium in the Hague, a concert hall created inside a building whose façade on the main road is preserved. And yet, on reading the yearbook, one detects beneath the walk down memory lane the precise critical intent to describe the far broader cultural phenomenon of the abandonment of “ideologies” and splendor for architecture linked to the client and reality. Deriving from this is a more marked interest in solid local materials (brick and wood) and their capacity to retain memory and convey a feeling of security. The buildings thus take on new expressivity connected with conscious interpretation of local situations and with users’ needs.

Hans Ibelings also describes the phenomenon of contemporary traditionalism in the Netherlands in his work Unmodern Architecture, commenting on this present-day phenomenon with the same lucidity and detachment used in other writings to depict the advent of “super-modernism”. Though diametrically opposite, both merit the same critical approach by virtue of their contemporary relevance. The strange oxymoronic term Neo-Traditionalism describes a contemporary, present-day Dutch paradox, a phenomenon that is timeless because it is linked to an affection for the past. As he points out: - many traditions are recent inventions, tradition is a construct, and awareness of it usually emerges when the tradition itself is no longer evident -. ⁽⁴⁾

Ibelings goes on to point out how some firms have adopted an attitude similar to the fashion houses that, even though newly born, apply the lever of nostalgia and present themselves to the public as carrying on the tradition of decades. He compares traditionalist architecture to organic food: - once there was nothing else and the adjective was not necessary; sometimes there is a return to what was once normal but is now rare or completely forgotten -. ⁽⁵⁾

The Dutch critic regards the investigation of traditionalism as involving the present, just as those who go in for slow food are simultaneously conservative and progressive.

There is thus nothing surprising about the number of recent works using the pitched roof (MVRDV and John Bosch in Ypenburg and S333 in Bloembollenhof, to mention just a few), an archetypal and functional form that still tells stories connected with present-day ways of life.

Debordering
Founded in 1994 by Alex van der Beld and Haiko Meijer, the Onix group has developed in Groningen, a town near the Danish border, geographically and culturally far away from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the institutional centers of architectural debate. Onix has scattered a considerable number of works throughout this primarily agricultural area, reinterpreting its rural character through the use of a modern vocabulary and a repertoire of tactile and visual sensations embedded in the imagination of its inhabitants. Their works, ranging from residential buildings to installations, display certain recurrent features, above all the use of wood, the source of the “strange confidence” they see in their projects. They have pursued this ambiguity ever since their very first works in the conviction that modernity depends not on the nature of a material but on the use made of it. This dual identity – comfortable and minimal, warm but with radical forms – is particularly evident in the details and the way in which the surfaces are brought into collision. A façade never tells a single story but anticipates or dissimulates what will take place on the opposite side. (Everything depends on the handling of the corner, where one of the two planes that meet prevails over the other.) In this way, the directionality of the building is increased and a hierarchy is established between pure, minimal façades and hybrid façades in which hierarchies of surfaces and materials are clearly visible.

These operations, which complicate plastic perception, are carried out by means of a mechanism that is always much the same with a slight variation of components (materials, angle of inclination, and functions). A principle of “debordering” is adopted whereby the surfaces do not end with a line (the limit) but survive in an event distinguished by its thickness.

[ ] Each surface undergoes continuous development, with the floor becoming wall and then roof. The roles are often confused, and what is longitudinal on the upper level becomes transversal on the lower. This overlapping of roles and volumes generates tensions and accommodates lifestyles [ ].

[ ] Onix adopts a grammar made up of texture and scanning, where directions are underscored by grain and joints, and where the material is never a pretext but part of an immanent plastic idea. It thus happens that the warmth and intimacy suggested by wood are associated with unconventional forms belonging to a repertoire that is anything but traditional.

“Along with a number of friends from Groningen at NAT we had already thought that it would be interesting to transform the Danish DogmA rules for film (which grew out of dissatisfaction with the monotony of Hollywood productions) [ ]:

1. The design must be made specifically for the location. No pre-designed parts or details may be used.
2. The façade(s) must never be designed apart from the plan(s) or vice versa.
3. Drawings and models are hand-made. Architecture can be visualized by computer models, but computer programs do not generate architecture.
4. Materials are used as they are. Covering and colour coatings are forbidden.
5. Reference images and photomontages in the drawings are forbidden.
6. The building must not contain superficial or unnecessary constructions and ornaments.
7. Temporal and geographical alienation is forbidden. That is to say that the architecture takes place here and now.
8. Style designs are not acceptable.
9. All drawings must be made by the architect.
10. The architect must not be credited.” ⁽⁶⁾

 

NOTES
(1) Strange Confidence: Oxymoron invented by Onix (Alex van de Beld, Strange confidence, region-specific building and architecture today) ↩
(2) VINEX is a Dutch acronym originally referring to the Supplement of the Fourth Policy Document on Physical Planning (1990) and subsequently used to indicate all the areas of urban expansion envisaged by the Supplement (VINEX localities). This scenario has become essential to any understanding not only of building market dynamics but also and above all the socio-cultural changes affecting architecture in the Netherlands over the last decade.↩
(3) Op. cit. n. 1. ↩
(4) Hans Ibelings, Unmodern Architecture, Contemporary traditionalism in the Netherlands, NAi Publishers ↩
(5) Ibid. ↩
(6) Alex van de Beld, Strange confidence, region-specific building and architecture today ↩