Dutchtown: A City Centre Design By Oma/Rem Koolhaas

Architectural Review, The, June, 2000 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

By Michelle Provoost, Bernard Colenbrander, Flonis Alkemade. Amsterdam: NAi Publishers. 999. HFL55,00

The Dutch town of Almere was planned from the late 1960s on a true tabula rasa on the reclaimed Flever Polder to the east of Amsterdam. Three residential areas were soon established, each based on a different urban theme, but until recently there was no plan for the town centre. This booklet accompanied an exhibition held at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which described how a public authority brought together (with, apparently, much gnashing of teeth all round) the Koolhaas office and the Dutch developer MAB: the latter desperately defending its not unreasonable aim of creating a pleasant residential environment, and the former trumpeting its disgust for anything bourgeois at every opportunity.

It's a useful little book, providing a valuable guide to a debate about public space in Holland which is both visionary and realistic. The architectural waffle is, however, frightful. The OMA proposal comprises a concentration of tower blocks and a curved mound of earth covering a car park with shops on top. This car park is presented in heroic terms, and is variously described with expressions such as Espace Piranesien and a playing field for the contemporary urbanite, although there is no reason here to suppose that there is anything that distinguishes it from any other underground car park. There is indeed no evidence that any of their design is based on anything but visual gesturing. This waving of inflated texts to describe what appear to be banalities, these concept models and these dead-blank computer renderings fall, in my opinion, into the category of irritating pretentious rubbish.