September 17, 2003
Correspondence with Bart Lootsma: Reflections on MVRDV, Rem Koolhaas, and Dutch Urbanism
by Nader Vossoughian
In his very provocative essay “What is (really) to be Done? The Theoretical Concepts of MVRDV,” recently published in Reading MVRDV(Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2003), Bart Lootsma makes the case for a rethinking of the notion of utopia in this twenty-first century age. Citing the work of Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, better known as MVRDV, he argues against urban planning critics like Rem Koolhaas and Manfredo Tafuri, who associate utopianism with totalitarianism. While Lootsma is quick to observe MVRDVs indebtedness to the Office of Metropolitan Architecture and its principal, Rem Koolhaas, he insists that their organizational and datascape-based methodologies have helped inject new optimism into architecture and urbanism, reinvigorating the designer's role as an agent of social change.
In my correspondence with Lootsma, I inquire about his characterization of MVRDV vis-à-vis Dutch modernism. While I concede that MVRDV and its modernist forbearer Cornelis van Eesteren rely heavily on quantitative research methodologies, I also question in my letter if Lootsma does not overstate the similarities between MVRDV and the practices of the 1920s Dutch avant-garde. In my view, Van Eesteren was an unreconstructed humanist. He wanted to make the world a better place. By contrast, MVRDV seeks as much as anything to poke fun at rationalist modernism. Like Koolhaas, it appears to exhibit a degree of self-irony that is absent in the work of Van Eesteren and his colleagues.
Below is the response I received. Interestingly, Lootsma couches his remarks by way of the contemporary social and political climate in the Netherlands. He argues that MVRDV has managed (unlike Koolhaas) to articulate a coherent urbanistic philosophy that – similar to the work of Van Eesteren – maintains an active dialogue with legal and social norms, a dialogue that can only be seen against the backdrop of economic globalization, the privatization of the domestic housing market, and the internal idiosyncrasies of Dutch architecture and graphic communication.
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To: Nader Vossoughian
From: Bart Lootsma
re: MVRDV, Koolhaas, and Dutch Architecture
Dutch architecture seems indeed to be in a formal and theoretical vacuum. One could say many things about that. Whatever the impression abroad may be, based on the reading of the books of Rem Koolhaas and Ben van Berkel, theory has a very low appreciation in the Netherlands. Over the last couple of years, the most important critics and theoreticians disappeared from the scene. I moved to Vienna, for example, after the new dean of the Berlage Institute clearly expressed that he had no interest in research and theory and the director told me that they wanted 'to do it in a simpler way'. The formal vacuum is caused both by the rapid succession of styles over the last twenty years, which has turned style into something very similar to fashion, and the privatization of the housing market, which has led to a blossoming of neo-styles and pushed architects largely out of business where housing is concerned.
But there is also a deeper reason for this formal and theoretical vacuum. This reason has everything to do with the fact that in the Netherlands the debate is much more about urbanism than about architecture. Since the acceptance of the Housing Act in 1901, cities are obliged to make extension plans, and in the course of the century a very interesting system of national, regional, and urban planning was built up. Planning is a very important political issue in the Netherlands – even if the system is currently undermined by privatizations and globalization. Privatization means that there exists no political control over flows of money any longer. Globalization means that the Netherlands cannot function any longer as a kind of Petri dish, but that there are all kinds of complex relationships with other parts of the world. Immigration is an example of this complex interdependency, as is the new competition between regions (as opposed to countries) within the European Union. Industry is moving increasingly to low-wage countries, and agriculture has become much more profitable in other parts of Europe and the rest of the world. Still, the Dutch voters expect the politicians to organize their country to an extent they never would in other countries.
In this situation, the main issue for architects always was and is to find new control mechanisms on an urban and regional scale to accomodate the growth of the built environment. If you ask me about the difference between MVRDV and Koolhaas' concept of planning, I would say that they start more or less from the same premises, but in that they couldn't be more different in the end. Koolhaas is extremely Dutch in the way he presents issues of urbanism around the world. On the other hand, he has a relationship with the Netherlands that borders on self-hatred. He finds it ridiculous to speak about the Netherlands as if anything would or should be different there than anywhere else and if it is; he hates it. For Rem, there is just the global constellation, and he searches for urban mechanisms that are at work everywhere. Also, his position is highly contradictory. On the one hand, he has a love for planning and the central control that is needed for it. He always admired the French, particularly under Mitterand. On the other hand, he hates the design aspect of the plans of Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen to such a degree that he does not even acknowledge Van Lohuizen, the man of the survey, or the politics that enabled Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen to work. In the Netherlands, Koolhaas has always been in favor of the privatization of the housing market and has felt that national planning was not going far enough. In Rem's urbanism, there is no method. His approach of urbanism as a subject of study is still marked by his background as a journalist and a screenplay writer. In terms of projects, there are just concepts and partial ad-hoc strategies - even if they are large-scale - and they can be very different from each other. If you speak of self-skepticism and disenchantment, Koolhaas is your man.
MVRDV, by contrast, seems to be much more interested in methods; methods of research - the datascapes - and methods of organization. The datascapes are very similar to the spatialization of the survey by Van Lohuizen and Van Eesteren. There is one crucial difference, however: Van Lohuizen just used 'raw' data, quantifications of programs . Many of those quantifications were later transferred into a bureaucracy of laws, regulations and norms. MVRDV use both raw statistical data - from the Netherlands Bureau for Statistics -and spatializations of those rules that became institutionalized. These produce the complex envelopes within which a project has to develop.
This is a basic difference, mirroring as it does changes in society at large; for one, the rise the rise of abstract systems replacing traditional authority, as Anthony Giddens has defined it. Although Rem Koolhaas recently seems to have become aware that this tendency (i.e., abstraction and bureaucratization) is characteristic for European politics as a whole, he would never take it as serious as MVRDV. Your characterization of Van Eesteren as an unreconstructed humanist may be true. MVRDV would appear as post-humanists then. But that is a characterization that has already been claimed in other ways that do not do justice to what they are after. Their intentions - dealing with collective risks and desires - come much closer to Van Eesteren than Koolhaas.
But MVRDV also deal with another important change in society, which has to do with advocacy, and which has been analyzed by Ulrich Beck as a new way of making politics from bottom up. Many people are puzzled and irritated by what they see as game-playing and parody in the work of MVRDV. Within Dutch urban planning, cartoon-like simplifications are nothing special, as all offices use similar imagery. Willem Jan Neutelings even makes clear references to the Belgian Dutch tradition of the 'clear line' in comics, initiated by people like Herge. These cartoons enable architects to summarize ideas in a simple way, they are a particular kind of diagram. They enable the architect to present his or her ideas clearly to politicians (not just elder men and mayors, but also city councils and advocacy procedures).
There is never just one such cartoon; rather, their author always offers a choice of alternatives, something to be discussed in public. Sometimes, they show the real consequences of what politicians want; knowing that when they will become visible, they will distance themselves from them. But they are also instrumental as generative tools. As such, they are largely open to amendments and changes in the situation over the period the project is developed.
I will never forget how both Winy Maas and I were involved in a charette about finding a new program for the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. In the discussions, Winy would constantly summarize what was said in quick cartoon-like drawings. But also he would present quick cartoon-like sketches for solutions. I have never seen an architect that could so easily use the input of other parties in a project. This process, which is very different from making a proposal for a competition, in which the final result has to appear as a vision, is characteristic for MVRDV's approach.
Skepticism, maybe, as there is the clear awareness that a plan will never be realized exactly as the architect draws it. Disenchantment, no. There is the constant optimistic search for new methods.
Somehow, the categorizations that have been used in architecture, like 'humanist', do not apply here. The only thing that counts is democratic decision-making that transforms ideological and philosophical questions. Politics do define the program, but not with Mao's little red book in its hands. That does not mean the programs formulated are not ambitious: they may deal with migration or the environment or whatever on a large scale. Maybe 'post-ideological' might be a term here -but this does not mean there isn't something like an ideology present. On the contrary, I would say there is. But it is a kind of 'open source' ideology.
Bart Lootsma is Visiting Professor at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. His publications include Super Dutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands (2000) and Body & Globe: Dwelling in an Age of Media and Mobility (2003).