seemed to conform to this artificial tradition of humanistic, Modernist typologies for the people. And (following Bakema) Rem Koolhaas made his own little houses party down with big spaces. The result of absorbing the modern twenties into the postmodern eighties was, not surprisingly, the reconstruction of its monuments as simulacra of a bygone era. The main beneficiary of this extraordinary project of Historical Renewal, coordinated by the planners from their offices in the SOM towers, was J.J.P. Oud. Between the mid eighties and the mid nineties Oud’s built heritage from the 1920s was entirely reconstructed to fit the ideas developed about it since that time. First, Oud’s Café de Unie from 1924 was rebuilt. This small project was Oud’s most De Stijl like building, in that it actually looked like a Mondrian with windows and a door. It was razed along with the surrounding city center in the bombing of 1940. In 1986, its facade was rebuilt on an entirely different location, now outfitted to house the Rotterdam Arts Council and a bar. A second element in the revision was the destruction of the Witte Dorp, the beautiful triangular estate of white modern houses with pitched roofs, much admired by Henry Russell Hitchcock. It was replaced by a neomodern pastiche using the same color scheme to house exactly the same inhabitants as in the old white village. And then there was the destruction of Oud’s most monumental and influential brick housing block, block IX in Spangen. Built in 1919, it was destroyed in deference to Oud’s later image as a humanist, a builder of small modernistic houses, not of hard edged repetitive city blocks. Another of the brick blocks in Spangen, which featured particularly charming De Stijl like corners, was covered with white plaster, the better to resemble a Mecanoo building. These projects were merely preludes to the massive reconstruction of the Kiefhoek that began in the 1980s. Between 1989 and 1995, row after row of the ‘little houses’ was demolished and rebuilt, with one house preserved as a museum, complete with the original furniture. The reconstruction successfully accomplished a most difficult task: making sixty year old houses conform precisely
to the exacting Dutch housing regula¬tions of the 1990s. With this, an ideal past and an ideal present were brought into alignment. One strategy used to achieve this convergence was the recasting of two dwellings as a single house. This was an old city renewal trick from the 1970s, aimed at thinning out old neighborhoods. Yet this urban strategy produced a formal problem for architecture: such houses had two front doors, one of which was now redundant. This was unacceptable in terms of a modernist ethos which demanded functional honesty. So one door was changed into a door shaped window. The door shaped window is in fact the only sign that the rows of little houses are actually the facades of much bigger houses. Otherwise, the reconstruction was fanatically precise, so much so that obsolete building techniques were resurrected and employed by a new generation of craftsmen and architects. Perhaps the strangest chapter in the Oud revision was the reconstruction of a temporary structure which had been used to house the architect and builders during the construction of the white village. Designed in a recognizable De Stijl vocabulary, the site hut had remained for some years in the center of the village green before being used by the inhabitants as fuel during the winter famine of 1944. In 1993, sponsored by a paint factory, the same architect who rebuilt the Kiefhoek painstakingly rebuilt the hut and had it placed on a dike next to the reconstructed village, at the foot of the planners’ offices in the SOM towers. A second copy was placed on the factory grounds in Sassenheim, near Leiden. The hut in Rotterdam is open to the public a couple of hours each week; inside you can view old photographs of the original. Its primary colors are always fresh. Thanks to the regular defacements with graffiti, it gets repainted nearly every week.
8. International Theorism and Global Starchitecture. 1995 1999 Rotterdam 1995. Rem Koolhaas, Holland’s most famous architect in the world, presents S,M,L,XL, a brick like book of 1345 pages and an immediate international bestseller.
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New Canaan 1996. Philip Johnson ‘casually’ leaves S,M,L,XL lying on his coffee table, while international photographers and journalists swarm through his Glass House. Rotterdam 1997. The International Theorism and Global Starchitecture elite of the ANY foundation swoops down on Holland and holds its annual conference in the Netherlands Architecture Institute. Latent tensions between different factions of ANY are exacerbated and find their outlet in Dutch Architecture. Rem Koolhaas attacks Ben van Berkel for making rigid and oppressive architecture which, with the help of International Theorist Sanford Kwinter, is made to seem free and flexible by being described with metaphors borrowed from complexity theory. New Canaan 1997. Ben van Berkel visits Philip Johnson in his Glass House. New York 1997. Dutch Critic Bart Lootsma organizes the Poldergeist manifestation during which Dutch Modern Architecture is presented as a coherent but diversified community of innovation, uniquely bound to the social democratic ‘polder model’ and the tradition of Dutch Modernism. Amsterdam 1998. Ben van Berkel strikes back at Rem Koolhaas with an article in the Dutch architecture magazine Archis on Koolhaas’s Educatorium building in Utrecht. The building in particular and Koolhaas’s work in general is accused of being adventurous and ‘free’ only on a semantic level. Rotterdam 1998. Rem Koolhaas’s most famous pupil in Holland ever, Winy Maas, presents FARMAX, a brick like book of 736 pages and an immediate bestseller. Winy Maas has come to stand for the typical Dutch architect, with a certain pragmatism regarding the conditions under which he works: suburbanization, automobility, pop culture and a certain coquettishness about his Dutchness. He uses techniques and images taken from Koolhaas, but not his tortured attitude towards the Netherlands. He is never cynical, but always slightly ironic and gets a lot of work without too much struggle. This brings out the vindictive streak in Rem Koolhaas. New Canaan 1998. In casual conversations with visitors to his Glass House, Philip Johnson, godfather of the ANY corporation, alternately calls Rem Koolhaas and Ben van Berkel the best new
Maxwan - Familie van bruggen (plattegrond) in Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht, 1998
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Rotterdam 1996. Queen Beatrix opens the Erasmus Bridge, a gigantic steel and concrete river crossing designed in deconstructivist style by the young architect and theorist Ben van Berkel. The bridge and the book are seen as defining moments in the global hype of Dutch Architecture. In their wake the Netherlands is again regarded as the hotbed of Architectural Innovation.
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