How social is Dutch architecture?
How social is Dutch architecture?
The English translation of my article ‘How social is Dutch architecture?’ has been published online by Archined.
Enjoy. (if you haven’t already).
Book review of Michelle Provoost’s ‘Hugh Maaskant – Architect
Tozindo Factory – Maaskant 1961
Book review of Michelle Provoost’s ‘Hugh Maaskant – Architect
Website Blueprint Magazine – review
Hugh Maaskant was a Dutch functionalist architect who evolved into a corporate modernist and fully reaped the benefits of the post-war transformation of Dutch society into a welfare state and consumer society. For a long time corporate modernist architects were somewhat dismissed, either because the quality of their work did not speak to the imagination, or because they were not avant-garde nor sufficiently ideologically motivated to be worthy of scrutiny. In the case of Maaskant both is true, in my mind. On the one hand there appears very little reflection on the part of Maaskant what the larger ideological goals are, which he served, – apart from the notion that one should follow the Zeitgeist and be as modern as possible -, and on the other hand there are very few of his buildings which are truly inspiring. The factory above and the Tomado House in Dordrecht are exceptions). His style is usually middling between modern formalism and overly muscular structural expression, and it rarely has the purity and elegance of someone like Rietveld.
Be that as it may, the reassessment of ‘corporate’ modernists is a welcome addition to the historiography of modernism, and it is laudable that Crimson have taken on Maaskant and are working on a publication of J.H. van den Broek. In the case of this book by Michelle Provoost I did have the sense that the pendulum swung too far, and that she tried to make Maaskant a more important figure than he really was. In this review I have made a distinction between historiography as a genealogical narrative versus the writing of critical history. Regrettably the book of Provoost fits too much in the first category; hagiography as myth making. For instance her claim that Maaskant has inspired the generation of SuperDutch architects is outright overstated. Naturally people at MVRDV, Neutelings Riedijk and so on freely admit that they like his work, but I do not recall that Maaskant was mentioned much by them in the early nineties. Closer to the truth is that Maaskant was just one inspiration amongst many.
I hope you’ll enjoy the piece.
Book Review: Aesthetics of Sustainability
Book Review: Aesthetics of Sustainability
I reviewed Aesthetics of Sustainability in April 2012 and it continues to haunt me. Even though sustainability is often discussed, we rarely want to face the deeper questions about our patterns of consumption, the madness of economic growth in a world of finite resources and how to combat vested economic interests. This cocktail of issues is naturally incredibly difficult to address, and it is good to take inspiration from people like Ralph R. Knowles, for instance, who has been exploring alternatives for a long time.
Book Review: A New Kind of Bleak by Owen Hatherley
Cover “A New Kind of Bleak” – Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley is on his way to become a force in architectural criticism in the United Kingdom. I prefer his shorter pieces on his blog and in magazines to his books, as he has the tendency to become repetitive in the books. I found that when he assesses European modernism this is done through a particularly British lens, perhaps in the same way as I look at British modernism with incredulity at times. This review was intended to encourage Hatherley to ground his thesis better, to do deeper and more original research and, perhaps most of all, that the narrative and argument will follow an arc throughout his future books.
I say this from a position of modesty, however, as I have yet to write my first book myself.
On a funny note, there is a soundtrack to accompany the reading of the book, by the collective GOLAU GLAU ->
On a final note, to underscore that Hatherley does address the right issues, read this article in the Guardian.
Related articles
Book Review: Sketchbooks by Souto de Moura and Wang Shu
Sketch by Souto de Moura
Sketch by Souto de Moura
The photo links to a book review on two sketchbooks by Souto de Moura and Wang Shu, published by Lars Müller Publishers.
Book Review: “Building Seagram” by Phyllis Lambert
Book Review: “Building Seagram” by Phyllis Lambert
Phyllis Lambert, the client representative and (later) architect who was intimately involved in the building of the Seagram building of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, has recently written a book in which she explores the history of the building on many different levels. Worth a read.
Image: courtesy of Shorpy, Samuel H. Gottscho
Book Review: “Bio-Politics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture” by Sven-Olov Wallenstein
My review appeared on 5 August 2009 in Building Design
The relationship between philosophy and architecture is tenuous. Both architecture and philosophy are expressions of thought, either explicit or subliminal. Architecture in particular, being a collective rather than an individual endeavour, can be seen as a carrier of values and aspirations more widely held within society. In addition, the building of an argument within philosophy has often been compared to the erection of an edifice.
For me, as an architect and not a philosopher, the relationship between the two gets strained when architects try to express the latest developments within philosophy in their buildings, or when philosophers draw evidence for their theories from buildings. This book tries to do just that. It takes Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and attempts to show how it finds expression in architecture, or how this concept is “materialised and spatialised in urban and architectonic forms”.
The essay starts, as is to be expected, with an explanation of the terms used, the key terms being subjectification and power, and the relationship between the two. In my understanding biopolitics covers the processes of subjugation and subjectification, or the totality of ways in which modern individuals are formed. This is to say that there is both an external force as well as an internal force shaping the identity of the self. Modern society, and with it the dissolution of absolutist power in favour of more subtle ways of exerting control over its “subjects”, is therefore both limiting and liberating at the same time.
The body of the essay, and for me the most interesting part, is devoted to tracing how, since the French Revolution, these liberating processes of individualisation have not only eroded the relationship with the sovereign power, and led to secularisation and the development of the sciences, but have also meant a complete shake down of the classical architectural paradigm.
Not surprisingly, in the context of Foucault, the development of hospitals over the same period is then investigated as a model for how the process of subjectification is played out in the urban space at large.
As a hospital is a highly controlled environment it does seem to be an excellent Petri dish to study these processes, but caution should be applied here. Firstly, the hospital example is an isolated case, and an atypical one at that. Secondly, the reading of actual urban environments is a much more complicated case. After all, urban sediment is accrued over time, thus often dodging control and planning.
To see the hospital as a diagram of power relations is one thing, but how is this useful? How, in other words, do these conclusions translate to the design of the environments in which we actually live most of our lives? It is telling, in this sense, that “Foucault never addressed himself to contemporary developments in any detail”. Wallenstein’s argument deserves to be expanded to prove its real validity.
Albert Speer & Leon Krier
Leon Krier has written a book on Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, in which Krier offers an appraisal of the ‘quality’ of the architecture of Speer and plays down his role as a war criminal and close friend and aide to Hitler. The book is a re-issue of a book published in 1985 with the more distasteful passages taken out, as the Wall Street Journal explains. The de-ideologization of architecture is a dangerous post-modern tendency.
The book is advertized on the publisher’s website (Monacelli Press) as follows:
“Krier candidly confronts the great difficulty of disentangling the architecture and urbanism of Albert Speer from its political intentions. Krier bases his study on interviews with Speer just before his death. The projects presented center on his plan for Berlin, an unprecedented modernization of the city intended to be the capital of Europe.”
The first issue I would like to address is the misguided notion that somehow it is possible to separate architecture from politics; in other words that you can assess the relative aesthetic merits of architecture in separation from its historical and political context and, perhaps more importantly, separate its analysis from the ideological aims of those who commissioned it. As Giedion points out in his essay on monumentality in the 1950s, the problem with neo-classicism and its monumentality had become its association with oppressive regimes. The megalomaniacal architecture of Soviet social-realism was, in fact, stylistically very close to the neo-classicism of the Third Reich. All you needed to do is replace the swastika for a hammer and sickle and no one would know the difference. The regimes were extremely close in both form and content; Neo-classical signs to validate universal repression and genocide. Neo-classicism had reached a point of moral bankruptcy, in the same way as Western civilization and its Enlightenment tradition had to face its denouement. The notion of disentanglement and recuperation of neo-classicism is not commendable, as the publisher’s blurb suggests, it is outright dangerous and misguided.
The question of recuperation, and by extension of what buildings should look like in the future, is encapsulated in the second part of the quote; “the unprecedented modernization of the city intended to be the capital of Europe”. At this point I start to pull hairs out of my head in indignation. Unprecedented? What about Paris, the boulevards of Haussmann and the Palace of Versailles? What about Rome? Our history is replete with self-aggrandizing urban plans of despotic rulers. Go read a book you silly person working at a publishing house!
What is perplexing here is the use of the word ‘modernization’. The term for me has not only a technological and materialist connotation, but also a humanist one. You cannot, in my mind, achieve true modernization when technological advances are being used to oppress more people, to kill more people and to kill them faster, or to destroy the planet in a more efficient manner. That is not modernization but mental illness. I have said it, to call the plans of Albert Speer for Berlin ‘modernization’ is to completely lose your moral compass.
I can not wait to read the book in full and pass on my judgment.
thomaswensing 