A Hundred Years of Dutch Architecture: Trends, Highlights

A Hundred Years of Dutch Architecture reconstructs the frames of reference within which Dutch architects operated in the century that has just ended--to great international acclaim, for certain. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is arguably Dutch designers more than any others who are leading the way in innovative, ground-breaking, problem-solving design. One need only think of MVRDV, Rem Koolhaas's OMA or UN Studio to see the impact that Dutch architecture has on international thinking about structures. What better way to understand how we got here than to look back at the last century? Hence A Hundred Years of Dutch Architecture, wherein exhaustive documentation of 20 buildings and complexes built between 1901 and 2000 provides the opportunity to examine significant tendencies in building design. Each of these projects embodies a take on a particular architectural issue and serves as a crystallization point for five different approaches--traditionalist, expressionist, functionalist, rationalist and postmodernist--that can be distilled from the welter of design strategies. The significance both social and design-wise of these architectural strands is explored in five individual essays; documentation of the buildings is provided partially through the architects' original drawings. Also included is a removable timeline that traces the lines of development of Dutch architecture in a clear and easy-to-follow form: 1,000 characteristic architectural works, one for each year, are placed against a backdrop of related technical and social developments. Among the projects documented at length in this book are designs by Berlage, De Klerk, Rietveld, Dudok, Oud, Friedhoff, Van Eyck, Hertzberger, Koolhaas and Coenen.