A Struggle For Identity At The Stage Of World Architecture

The Dutch architectural legacy is as evident in the Rijksmuseum’s painted cityscapes as in the the lucid, yellow signs in Schiphol’s baggage depot. It is immanent in the nation’s hydro-engineered, below sea-level coastal cities. The tradition is old and has undergone many phases. 

But in recent decades, the small European country has exerted an inordinate amount of influence with a type of architecture that has evaded the “isms” of the last century. It has earned a more popular name: “Superdutch,” best represented by world-famous practices including UNStudio and Wiel Arets Architects in Amsterdam; Mecanoo in Delft; and MVRDV and the seminal Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam. 

This is not an architecture of conforming townhouses, bridges and canals — but emblematic of the globalized market economy of today: cantilevered skyscrapers, stylish reticulated bridges and and shining corporate campuses.

Now, as the World Architecture Festival prepares to return to Amsterdam for the second year in a row this December, the significance of this movement is back in the spotlight. But as the recently unveiled shortlist for the awards show demonstrates, this kind of architecture faces a strong challenge from humbler and more contextual architecture coming up around the world.

One can trace the rise of Superdutch to the early 90’s, when the ideas behind it were evangelized by a generation of architects under the purview of an intellectual icon, Rem Koolhaas, and the kind of architecture that he advocated: less prescriptive of style, and more focused on the reconsideration of the design process itself. 

Disappointed by the sterility of modernism and impressed by the “bigness” of crowded cities like New York, Koolhaas proclaimed that people sought to “exist in a world totally fabricated by man” where capitalism and materialism ultimately influenced the nature of cities. A novel approach emerged from his ideas: where the architect’s job was to develop daring urban interventions that would encourage the spontaneity and grandeur of these chaotic environments.

This view of architecture was apt at justifying some of the outrageous forms that emerged from Dutch architecture at the time, and paved the way for some of the most striking buildings of our age. Daring overhangs and sprawling geometries were explained as unusual yet clever solutions to programmatic challenges, and the unique penchant for both efficiency and spectacle proved to be a big international hit—predestined for the double-functions of museums and luxury housing.

Koolhaas developed a mold by which buildings could emerge like otherworldly invaders in the urban landscape, and his studio, OMA, emerged as a talent-factory from which individual architects could make a name for themselves.

“It has been a very influential movement for many generations of architects, not only in the Netherlands, but worldwide,” said Diego Guayasamin, an Ecuadorian architect who’s design for the UNASUR Headquarters in the outskirts of Quito was shortlisted for the 2019 World Architecture Festival. “You have Winy Maas of MVRDV in the Netherlands, Fernando Romero of FREE in Mexico, and Bjarke Ingels of BIG in Denmark.”

One can add Zaha Hadid, Joshua Ramus and Ole Scheeren to the list of famous architects who spent their formative years at OMA. 

Hadid, who passed away in 2016, worked under Koolhaas in Rotterdam before establishing her own successful firm in London—where she developed a distinctive, highly stylized and organic style that today marks skylines from Antwerp to Abu Dhabi. In her New York Times obituary she was described as embodying “the era of so-called starchitects, who roamed the planet in pursuit of their own creative genius.”

Her firm continues to produce distinctive architecture, including the recently completed Morpheus Hotel in Macau, which is shortlisted in the 2019 edition of the World Architecture Festival. 

Ramus, once the leader of OMA’s New York office, was a principal designer of the Wylie Theater in Dallas and the Seattle Central Library — “the most important library to be built in a generation“— before taking over the American outpost and rebranding it as REX Architecture. His design for the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center site is set to open in 2021.

And Scheeren, partner-in-charge of OMA’s most notorious project, the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, has found independent success in Asia after forming Büro Ole Scheeren Group. Two towering designs by the office, the DUO Twin Towers in Singapore and the MahaNakhon tower in Bangkok, are also shortlisted in this year’s World Architecture Festival.

The saturnian history of OMA forms a great part of the contemporary narrative of architecture. The studios that branched out of the Office—either amicably or through acts of rebellion—embody the latest advances in the profession, including heavy investments in technology, sustainability, and a commitment to research. They also represent some of the best competition that OMA faces in high-profile design competitions today. 

Yet much of their work still holds on to qualities that can be traced back to Koolhaas, not least of which is the barefaced, look-at-me architecture that distinguished itself in cities like Rotterdam and Dubai. The influence of his ideas on practices around the world is immeasurable—a case can be made that The Vessel in New York City, one of the most discussed and photographed architectural monuments of the year and another contender at the World Architecture Festival, carries some of the legacy of Superdutch in its conspicuous design. 

But before The Vessel had opened to the public, as architects gathered at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam last year, a rebuttal of this kind of architecture was building up momentum.

The November issue of the Architectural Review, which was hosting its own “Emerging Architects” awards show a few rooms down from the main stage, was eager to close the doors on the movement. “Superdutch is dead: Long live Superdutch,” read the editorial. A piece by Mark Minkjan chastised the representative architects for their silence on social housing issues in the Netherlands, while Hans Ibelings chronicled a new generation of Dutch architects seeking to distance themselves from the “flashiness” of their predecessors. 

When I visited the festival in November, Superdutch was being actively pushed to the background. A lecture by Peter Cook returned to a time in history when Dutch architecture was best expressed in projects such as social housing and orphanages. Other speakers sought to reassess the potential of architecture in socially-conscious ways. Women designers in particular—who in the past had been underrepresented in the event — delivered incisive remarks on issues big, small, curious, and unexplored.

Czech architect Eva Jiřičná presented a witty, often mesmerizing, talk about her iconic staircase designs, all weaved into a story about the East-West divide in Europe. The focus on detail, history, and politics was a refreshing, non-intellectualized exploration of the power of architecture to amplify cultural and societal changes—even through the small details. Jeanne Gang, the American architect famous for her interpersonal and environmental approach to housing, spoke about her vision for Chicago’s POLIS Station: a masterplan where police headquarters bleed into surrounding neighborhoods and encourage interpersonal, cross-generational, cross-economic socialization. 

Even Nathalie DeVries, co-founder and director of Rotterdam’s MVRDV, emphasized the need for collaboration between architects, masterplanners, and inhabitants. She advocated for the creation of urban environments where “the bases of buildings are established collectively, but where each expresses its inhabitants’ individuality,” and where “landscaping creates environments pushing for diversity.”

These discussions ran contrary to those evoked by the likes of Patrik Schumacher, the appointed heir to Zaha Hadid’s practice. Three years before, he had taken the stage at the festival in Berlin to advocate for a scrapping of social housing and the privatization of public spaces, and most recently proposed an end to “unbounded diversity of experimentation” so that the architecture profession could enter a new “hegemonic, unifying paradigm.”

At last year’s event, such polemicist manifestos—and a swathe of edgy, Superdutch-derivative designs—were eclipsed by submissions from overlooked parts of the world. Young and diverse teams of architects took over the event, zig-zagging in groups between the custom built “pods” in the convention hall, presenting their work to judges and winning dozens of awards.

In much the same way, the festival’s next rendezvous should provide new opportunities for these voices to be heard. China, Australia, and India are among the the top five countries entering the World Architecture Festival in 2019.

Back in last year’s show I was able to catch up with the Australian architect, John Wardle, to discuss what made his approach different from that of the so-called Superdutch architects.

“We bring a developed sense of humor, myths from a nation of storytellers,” Wardle said, hesitant to take singular credit for his firm’s work. “Our design seeks to be like a cultivar that represents all sorts of histories and genealogies, some of which have changed over time, as if with the climate.”

John Wardle Architects had just received the Royal Institute of British Architects Award for International Excellence — one of the industry’s top honors — for a humble renovation of a 19th century seafarer’s cottage on a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. 

Their work on the once-dilapidated house straddled a fine line between renovation and restoration. Modern architecture and sustainable building methods were introduced to the site, while scrupulous historical research informed the conservation of old rooms, furniture, and materials. 

Later that day, I found myself by the edge of a lecture hall with Sir David Adjaye, a Ghanaian-British architect who has made headlines around the world for his monumental architecture and involvement with the arts. There, our discussion turned to the festival’s official theme of “identity.”

Inspired by extensive travels in Africa—where he documented vernacular architecture throughout the continent—Adjaye never mentioned any dictums or overarching “paradigms” of design, but instead focused on the “role of embedded memory in craftsmanship” and how it influenced his work. His vision of architecture, he explained, is less grounded on individual expression than on the physical qualities of materials, and how they speak to our culture and collective memories.

In 2016, Adjaye’s design for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. was opened to the public — it’s bronze scrim façade, inspired by Yoruban handiwork, represents a similar cultivation of history and craft as that found in Wardle’s architecture. 

Adjaye laughed when I asked him what the American founders would think if they knew that an African-British architect would come to design the final set piece of the Washington Mall. “That might be their worst nightmare,” he admitted. “But at the same time, the city is a more mature project today: not a utopian vision anymore, but an acceptance of the imperfect contradiction that is the United States.” His work now, he noted, was to reject the “myth of having to create an identity.”

Work shortlisted for this year’s festival carries traces of these ideas, where design is less desperate to create unique identities for individual parcels of real estate and “starchitects” than to continue developing the histories of the cultures that surround them. Comfort Town, a housing project designed by Ukranian firm archimatika in Kiev, is an unhinged re-interpretation of soviet housing in the city: a stark contrast to its tall, grey, concrete neighbors. The colorful pitched rooftops of the project are distinctive, brilliant, and photographable — but the complex is anchored to the city through winding pedestrian pathways and space for schools and retail. 

Other entries, such as the Oasis Terraces in Singapore designed by Serie Architects, were keen to return to the formality of modernism while adapting the style towards sustainable, ecological ends. 

Today, our lived environment faces many pressing threats: the environmental cost of construction, a lack of social housing, a plague of ugliness in developer architecture, and the coming abandonment of our cities’ outer rings — the countryside and the suburbs, the Soviet blocks and the banlieues. 

These issues do not call for the development of new, obtrusive identities from scratch, but for a reconsideration of the environment we have inherited. For the time being, it seems as if a new kind of architecture—one which embraces the collective spirit of the inhabitants of cities, as opposed to the spectacle of architecture—is coming to the fore.

On my way out of the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center last November, I stumbled into a final conversation at the event’s gates.

“Amsterdam is the perfect city to hold this festival,” said Lucas, an AV technician posted outside for a smoke. “We are a trading people, internationalist at heart. We want to share ideas and take them all over the world.” 

For a second year in a row, the World Architecture Festival sets out to prove that better ideas are finally flowing in the opposite direction.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.