20TH-CENTURY & CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
- New buildings and icons of twentieth century architecture in perhaps the country with the highest quality of urbanism and the built environment.
- The lecturer runs her own practice which specialises in building contemporary museums, galleries and houses.
Why do the Dutch excel at architecture and urban design? It is hard to resist the temptation to make connections between the hard-won, man-made origin of much of the country’s surface area and the scrupulous consideration of the uses to which it is put, and between the high density of population and the highly developed sense of social responsibility which prevails in the Netherlands.
Another ingredient may be the independence of spirit and love of liberty which characterises much of Dutch life and society, born perhaps of the seafaring and trading history of the nation – in turn impelled by a poorly endowed and vulnerable habitat adjacent to the sea.
Good neighbourliness and fierce individualism do not normally make good bedfellows, but in dynamic tension may be the perfect recipe for an excellent built environment. Some of the most exciting architectural developments of the last hundred years have been sited in the Netherlands.
Dutch architecture is not just a matter of major showpiece buildings, though there are plenty of those. They arise in the context of an outstandingly high level of planing, building and urban design at every level, a phenomenon which has accelerated during the last twenty years.
This trip includes tours of a clutch of icons of modern architecture – Berlage’s Exchange in Amsterdam, Rietveld’s Schroder House in Utrecht, the Van der Nelle factory in Rotterdam, Dudok’s Town hall in Hilversum. And alongside these cutting edge developments are being completed all the time.
Such is the richness of the diet that a variant of Stendhal’s syndrome may set in, so the tour has been structured to allow for opportunities to opt out now and then to spend time in the great art galleries or wander the streets of the old town centres.
There is, however, one compelling reason not to join this tour. Whatever part of the world you come from, return is likely to lead to melancholy. By comparison with the brilliance of the Dutch scene, your home town is guaranteed to seem drab and depressing.