Even after you’ve conceded that architecture, like the other arts, thrives on novelty, and after you’ve noticed that Dutch architects have developed sophisticated media skills that help spread their words and images, it is still undeniable that something real is going on in the Netherlands.
That something is a visible body of completed work by a group of like-minded by wide-ranging practitioners from their thirties to their sixties who have long since passed (lightly, if at all) through postmodernism and come out the other side. These architects reject postmodernism’s period trappings and constructivism’s acutely angled discomforts; they offer no philosophical, symbolic , or literary references. Forget semantics and chaos theory - they go for the architectural gut.
