If you ask Dutch people about the state of architecture in their country today, sooner or later two reactions will inevitably come up. The first is a general lament about the decreasing architectural quality in what had hitherto been the model country for neo-modernism. The second is amazement about the triumphal procession of a new traditionalism which enjoys great popularity, particularly when it comes to house building. In fact, the Netherlands has developed a new centre for ‘New Urbanism’, partly in the slipstream created by the British and American precursors. Entire small towns were, and still are, based on the examples of villages, fortified towns or castles, with or without moats, from the Middle Ages.
Architects have at their mercy the devotees of neotraditionalism and the like, who are irreconcilably against even the term ‘traditional’, which is like a red rag to them. To that effect, genuinely objective, impartial surveys are rare. Hans Ibelings, author of the much-discussed book, Supermodernism, attempted to carry out such a survey. He accepts the possibility that the number of readers who have a strongly neutral attitude towards him may not be decreasing. However, he retorts: “Just as I wished to document supermodern architecture out of curiosity, I now attempt to provide a picture of another phenomenon in contemporary architecture, which fascinates me to the same extent and which I sum up under the name ‘contemporary traditionalism’.”
At the beginning of his book, Ibelings compares traditional architecture with biological nourishment: in the past nothing else existed. However, at the moment, because architecture was practically eliminated due to the effects of industrialisation, people must seek to reinvent it under another name. And traditionalism in architecture is considered to be like ‘organic’ when it comes to food – something which is a way of life or more superficially a lifestyle. Ibelings noticed that in a time when holding onto designs which have stood the test of time is viewed distrustfully, traditionalists must avail themselves of more radical, provocative views than their neomodernist counterparts – ‘precisely because they dare resist this tradition of the new’.
In Unmodern Architecture, Ibelings describes the development of ‘contemporary traditionalism’ and its main representatives in Holland, Rob and Léon Krier, Adolfo Natalini, Vera Yanovshtchinsky, Sjoerd Soeters and Molenaar & van Winden, to name but a few. In doing so, he makes it clear that they were nearly all trained in the tradition of post-war modernism and are now making up for what to a large extent passed the Netherlands by at the time: postmodernism. Ibelings keeps to the book’s promise by describing things impartially and therefore the book sometimes shows neotraditionalism in a new and unusual light. Unfortunately however, in doing so, he almost exclusively presents the views of the architects. The ‘fellow players’ have been faded out, despite the fact that without them the architectural movement would never have developed to such an extent. This included the housing industry, which gave contracts for the buildings, and the ‘man on the street’ as the buyer, the wishes of whom the new-old architectural style attempts to fulfil. Therefore, possibly inadvertently, Unmodern Architecture portrays neotraditio-nalism as something that it never was: an autonomous art (of building), which is practically detached from market forces.